Martin Luther King Jr.

Life and work

King was born into a family of Baptist ministers in Atlanta and pursued advanced theological study, earning a doctorate at Boston University, where he engaged deeply with both the Black church tradition of his upbringing and the philosophy of Christian nonviolent resistance associated with Mohandas Gandhi, which King came to see as a direct application of Jesus's teaching of love for enemies.

As a young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, King was thrust into national leadership when the Montgomery Improvement Association, organized after Rosa Parks's arrest, selected him to lead the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful year-long campaign that ended legal segregation on the city's buses and established King as the movement's most visible leader.

Over the following decade King led and inspired a series of major campaigns — including the 1963 Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington (where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech), and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches — that combined explicitly Christian moral appeal, strategic nonviolent civil disobedience, and effective use of media coverage to build pressure that contributed directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King's later activism increasingly linked racial justice to opposition to the Vietnam War and to economic inequality more broadly, positions that cost him support even among some former allies. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the youngest recipient at the time.

King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, while supporting a sanitation workers' strike, an event that provoked national grief and unrest and cemented his status as a defining American moral and religious figure; his birthday is now a U.S. federal holiday.

In their own words

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.""I Have a Dream" speech, 1963

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

Further reading

• Nobel Prize official biography: Martin Luther King Jr.
• The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University