Martin Luther King Jr： Risked Life for Civil Rights Movement ｜ Biography

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 and graduated as the valedictorian of Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. King became pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, and later completed his Ph.D. Martin Luther King was a religious man, he was a pastor, he looked at racism and all of the so-called separate but equal laws and the terrible treatment of people of color in the United States. He said, this is absolutely wrong, this is against God's will, this is not recognizing the dignity of peoples, and he made us all face that in very powerful ways. On the eve of Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of a city bus in 1955, King was chosen to lead a citywide bus boycott. Two years later, King and a group of civil rights activists formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to conduct nonviolent protests for civil rights. When Martin Luther King led the Alabama boycott, that was a major turning point in the fight for civil rights. What you saw was people who had been fractionized coming together as one, walking together with others joining the fight. This was when people, America, the world, stood up and said, whoa, what are we looking at here? An amazing time. Inspired by Gandhi's activism, King worked with the SCLC to organize black voters and civil rights protests. In 1963, King was arrested at a march in Alabama. During his prison time, King wrote a rebuttal to an article denouncing his methods. His longhand notes on the margins of the newspaper became known as Letter from Birmingham Jail and was famously republished and studied in colleges across the country. Martin Luther King was a man of God who believed that that calling necessitated social change in the present, and he put his life on the line for that calling. Free at last! Thank God Almighty! On August 28, 1963, King led more than 20,000 people in a massive demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial, where his speech, I Have a Dream, became a defining moment in civil rights history. Through his work, King helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and received the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Martin Luther King, according to Time in 1963, personified the civil rights movement. He took on one of the greatest challenges of his time and was one of the people that most influenced this very transformative time in American history. Although King faced criticism from more militant black leaders, he continued his peaceful efforts toward both racial and economic justice. After delivering his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech at a rally in Memphis, King was assassinated the next day on April 4, 1968, while standing at the balcony of his motel room. King's assassination was, I think, devastating for many people. But there is also a rising level of organization, and many people, King's assassination galvanizes them into many kind of black power movements across the country, many anti-poverty movements. So it's both a moment of despair, but also a moment of political flowering. Posthumously, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. Today, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday continues to be honored on the third Monday of every January.