Martin Luther King Jr

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.

King framed nonviolent direct action explicitly as Christian practice rather than mere political tactic, drawing on the Sermon on the Mount's teaching on loving one's enemies alongside Gandhian nonviolent resistance to build a theology in which redemptive suffering, accepted without retaliation, could expose injustice and appeal to an opponent's conscience. He helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, an organization of Black churches and ministers that became the institutional base for the campaigns of civil disobedience he led through the following decade, including the 1963 Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington the same year.

King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the youngest recipient at that time, in recognition of his leadership of the nonviolent movement against racial injustice in the United States. His later career expanded from civil rights specifically into broader campaigns against poverty and the Vietnam War, positions that drew criticism even from some civil rights allies but that King defended as consistent extensions of the same moral framework. His writings and recorded speeches remain under active copyright control by his estate, and this entry describes his life, theology and historical role without reproducing his own wording.