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King, Martin Luther, Jr.
8 articles on King, Martin Luther, Jr.
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 6853 Includes: Family Background and Education. | The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. | Nonviolent Mass Protest, 1960–1965. | Social Justice and Black Power. | The Assassination. | Martin Luther King in History and Memory. | Bibliography(b. 15 January 1929; d. 4 April 1968), Baptist minister and civil rights leader. Martin Luther King Jr. is arguably the most famous and revered African American of the twentieth century. All over the world, his life and legacy epitomize the black struggle for freedom and equality. The years from King's emergence as a civil rights leader during the 1955–1956 Montgomery, bus boycott until his violent death on 4 April 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, are widely considered as the crucial period of the civil rights movement, when the Jim Crow system was dismantled by nonviolent direct action and mass protest. In public memory, his martyrdom has made King into a larger-than-life figure. However, his elevation to the status of a worldly saint has often inhibited a clear understanding of his contribution to the black struggle. Despite four decades of research on virtually every aspect of his ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 3006 Includes: Education and Early Career | Montgomery Bus Boycott | Civil Rights Leadership | Voting Rights and Vietnam | Black Power and Black Poverty | Assassination and Legacy | Bibliography1929–1968
African American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which was founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s maternal grandfather. King, Jr., was ordained as a Baptist minister at age eighteen.King attended local segregated public schools before entering nearby Morehouse College at age fifteen and graduating with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 3637 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(15 Jan. 1929–4 Apr. 1968), Baptist minister and civil rights leader, was born Michael King Jr., in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of the Reverend Michael King (Martin Luther King Sr.) and Alberta Williams. Born to a family with deep roots in the African American Baptist church and in the Atlanta black community, the younger King spent his first twelve years in the home on Auburn Avenue that his parents shared with his maternal grandparents. A-block away, also on Auburn, was Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his grandfather, the Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, had served as pastor since 1894. Under Williams's leadership, Ebenezer had grown from a small congregation without a building to become one of Atlanta's prominent African American churches. After Williams's death in 1931, his son-in-law became Ebenezer's ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1276(1929–1968), civil rights leader, preeminent voice of the post–World War II African American freedom movement. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and namesake of a prominent Baptist minister, King entered Atlanta's Morehouse College at age fifteen. After graduation he enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he encountered Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel theology, Reinhold Niebuhr's justifications for the use of coercion to combat evil, and Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent direct action. Enrolling at Boston University, he earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology (1955). He married Coretta Scott in 1953; they had four children.In 1954, King was appointed pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. On 1 December 1955, the arrest of Rosa ParksforColdAfrican ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Military History
Word Count: 462(1929–1968), religious and protest leader and recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace. King gained national prominence as a black civil rights leader and, during his final years, as a critic of American military involvement in Vietnam. In his memoir, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King recalled that when initially exposed to pacifism, he concluded that war “could serve as a negative good in the sense of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force.” Only after becoming familiar with Gandhian notions of nonviolent resistance was he convinced that “the love ethic of Jesus” could be “a potent instrument for social and collective transformation.” As the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King became a nationally known advocate of civil disobedience. He led protest movements in Montgomery ( ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1093(1929–1968), orator, political strategist, essayist, and leader during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, the child of Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. Alberta King's father, Rev. A. D. Williams, helped found the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP and pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church, which King, Sr., commanded after Williams's death. Both preachers rocked the Ebenezer walls with their thunderous folk sermons while Alberta King played the organ and organized the choir. King, Jr., grew up immersed in the doctrine of Christian love and in the music and oratory of African American Baptist worship.In 1948 King, Jr., earned a bachelor's degree from Morehouse College, where he heard Benjamin Mays ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1279 Includes: BibliographyBorn 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. epitomized the efforts of African Americans during the civil rights movement. From 1956 to 1968 he became the most popular and effective leader of the movement for equality. After speaking at a rally and rescheduling a planned march in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of black sanitation workers who were on strike, King checked into room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. At 6:01 P.M. the next evening, that of 4 April 1968, he was shot dead while standing on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet struck King in the lower face and jaw and proceeded downward, nicking his spine and eventually lodging itself beneath his left shoulder blade. King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead within the hour. He was only thirty-nine years old. ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1999 Includes: BibliographyDespite the incomparable fame of Martin Luther King Jr., the core of his philosophy has been widely misunderstood. Ironically, it is King's oratorical prowess that itself has contributed to this misunderstanding. Admirers and critics alike have inaccurately frozen King at his 1963 March on Washington, focusing particularly on his “I Have a Dream” speech. This has yielded an oversimplified impression of King's philosophical underpinnings that blurs his sense of moral crisis, particularly as it revolves around race and class, a moral crisis that King wanted all humans to resolve.Born 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King, King became both the voice of and the primary theoretician behind the modern civil rights movement. King was prepared for such ...
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