12 questions · Society & Everyday
He was not always called Martin. Born Michael King in Atlanta in 1929, he and his father both changed their names after his father returned from a trip to Germany in 1934, deeply impressed by the reformer. The son grew up in Atlanta's Black middle class, skipped two grades, entered college at fifteen and finished a doctorate in theology in Boston at twenty-six. In the same year he took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Alabama, a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. The boycott that followed needed a spokesman: ideally someone who had not yet made enemies in town. King had been there a year. The boycott lasted 381 days and ended in victory at the Supreme Court. At twenty-seven, King was a national figure. His method came from Mahatma Gandhi, whose country he visited in 1959: non-violent resistance that makes the other side's violence visible instead of answering it. The calculation paid off in Birmingham, where dogs and fire hoses were turned on demonstrators in 1963 and the photographs turned the country around. From the Birmingham jail he wrote his famous letter to white clergymen who had counselled patience: justice too long delayed is justice denied. On 28 August 1963 some 250,000 people stood at the Lincoln Memorial. The part of the speech every child now knows was not in the script: the singer Mahalia Jackson called out „Tell them about the dream!“, and King put his notes aside. A year later he became the youngest person then to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and gave every cent of the money to the movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the political results. His last years were less comfortable than the monument allows. He spoke about poverty and against the war in Vietnam, lost allies over both, and was bugged and sent threatening letters by the FBI. On 3 April 1968 in Memphis he said he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The next evening he was shot on the balcony of his motel. He was thirty-nine.
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Michael
His father changed both their names in 1934 after a trip to Germany, out of admiration for the reformer Martin Luther.
💡 Did you know? The change was never formally registered; the birth record still read „Michael“ for decades.
The bus boycott
It lasted 381 days and ended with a Supreme Court ruling against segregation on buses.
💡 Did you know? King was 26 and had been the town's pastor for a year: part of why he was chosen as spokesman was that he had no enemies yet.
From Mahatma Gandhi
In 1959 King spent five weeks travelling through India to study the method where it began.
💡 Did you know? He said afterwards that to other countries one travels as a tourist, but to India he had come as a pilgrim.
From Birmingham Jail
It answered white clergymen who had urged patience: justice too long delayed is justice denied.
💡 Did you know? He started writing it in the margins of a newspaper, because he had no paper.
The Lincoln Memorial
Around 250,000 people had come to the March on Washington.
💡 Did you know? The famous passage was improvised: Mahalia Jackson called out „Tell them about the dream!“, and King left his script behind.
The Nobel Peace Prize
At 35 he was the youngest recipient there had been up to that point.
💡 Did you know? He kept none of the roughly 54,000 dollars: all of it went to the civil rights movement.
From Selma
The first attempt ended as „Bloody Sunday“, when troopers beat the marchers on the bridge.
💡 Did you know? The third and successful march drew 25,000 people: five months later the Voting Rights Act was law.
The Vietnam War
He called his own country the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, and lost allies over it all the way up to the White House.
💡 Did you know? He gave that speech exactly one year to the day before his assassination.
The FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover had him wiretapped for years; an anonymous letter urged him to kill himself.
💡 Did you know? The surveillance files are sealed until 2027: a court ordered them closed for fifty years in 1977.
Striking sanitation workers
Two men had been crushed in a faulty garbage truck and the city refused to change anything.
💡 Did you know? Their placards carried four words: „I Am a Man“.
A national holiday
It falls on the third Monday in January, near his birthday.
💡 Did you know? It took until 2000 for all fifty states to observe it: South Carolina was the last.
Foto: Dick DeMarsico · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Martin Luther King Jr.
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