Martin Luther King, Jr. | Biography, Speeches, Facts, & Assassination | Britannica (2024)

American religious leader and civil-rights activist

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Also known as: MLK Jr., Michael Luther King, Jr.

Written by

David L. Lewis David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and a professor of history at New York University. He has authored and edited some ten books and has received two Pulitzer Prizes (for his...

David L. Lewis,

Clayborne CarsonAll

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Last Updated: Article History

Quick Facts

Original name:
Michael King, Jr.
Born:
January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Died:
April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee (aged 39)
Also Known As:
MLK Jr.
Michael Luther King, Jr.
Awards And Honors:
Grammy Award (1970)
Nobel Prize (1964)
Notable Works:
“I Have A Dream”
Notable Family Members:
spouse Coretta Scott King
Role In:
16th Street Baptist Church bombing
American civil rights movement
March on Washington
Montgomery bus boycott
Selma March
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fair Housing Act
“I Have A Dream”
Poor People’s Campaign

See all related content

Top Questions

What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Baptist minister and social rights activist in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. He was a leader of the American civil rights movement. He organized a number of peaceful protests as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including the March on Washington in 1963. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and, at the time, he was the youngest person to have done so. Learn more.

What is Martin Luther King, Jr., known for?

Martin Luther King, Jr., is known for his contributions to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. His most famous work is his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in 1963, in which he spoke of his dream of a United States that is void of segregation and racism. King also advocated for nonviolent methods of protest, and he organized and staged countless marches and boycotts.

Who did Martin Luther King, Jr., influence and in what ways?

Martin Luther King, Jr., influenced people around the world. He advocated for peaceful approaches to some of society’s biggest problems. He organized a number of marches and protests and was a key figure in the American civil rights movement. He was instrumental in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the March on Washington. The holiday honoring King is often celebrated as the MLK Day of Service, a reflection of his legacy of addressing social problems through collective action.

Read more below:Historical significance and legacy

What was Martin Luther King’s family life like?

Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up as the middle child of Michael (later Martin Luther) King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. His father was the minister of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—the same church where Martin Luther King, Jr., would eventually minister. In 1953 King married Coretta Scott, and the two had four children: Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice.

How did Martin Luther King, Jr., die?

Martin Luther King, Jr., was standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, when he was shot by James Earl Ray. An hour later, King died at St. Joseph’s hospital. His death sparked riots across the country. In the United States he is memorialized on the third Monday of January every year—Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, which was first observed as a federal holiday in 1986.

News

Correction: Election 2024-North Carolina-Governor story Nov. 22, 2024, 4:07 PM ET (AP)

Correction: Election 2024-North Carolina-Governor story Nov. 22, 2024, 4:03 PM ET (AP)

Correction: Election 2024-North Carolina-Governor story Nov. 22, 2024, 3:56 PM ET (AP)

Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Early years

King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern Black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “Black Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous Black businesses and Black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.

This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents. “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only deepened King’s growing hatred of racial segregation.

Britannica QuizPop Quiz: 15 Things to Know About Martin Luther King, Jr.

At Morehouse, King favored studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King’s mentor at Morehouse was the college president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King’s father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man’s relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”

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Martin Luther King, Jr. | Biography, Speeches, Facts, & Assassination | Britannica (2024)
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