Martin Luther King Jr.
1 book analyzed
Biography
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. He entered Morehouse College at fifteen, earned a divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary, and completed his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University in 1955 — the same year the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. He was twenty-six when he became the leader of the most important social movement in American history. He led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organized campaigns in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago, delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington in 1963, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at the age of thirty-nine. He had been arrested twenty-nine times. He had been stabbed, bombed, surveilled by the FBI, and threatened daily with death. The Letter from Birmingham Jail was written in the middle of all of this — not at the beginning or the end, but at the point of maximum pressure.