A Baptist Preacher's Son

Martin Luther King Jr was born Michael King Jr on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a prominent Baptist minister; both father and son later took the name Martin Luther King in tribute to the Protestant reformer, following a 1934 trip the elder King took to Germany. King followed his father into the ministry, earning a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 after undergraduate study at Morehouse College and seminary training at Crozer Theological Seminary, where he first studied in depth the Christian social gospel tradition and the nonviolent resistance theory of Mohandas Gandhi that would shape his public career.

He became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954, and the following year was thrust into national leadership when the Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest, chose him as its spokesman. The boycott's success established King as the civil rights movement's most visible leader for the rest of his life. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968, while in the city supporting a sanitation workers' strike, an act that remains among the most consequential political killings in American history.