Martin
Luther King Jr. Biography
original name Michael Luther King, Jr.
( 1929 – 1968 )
(born Jan. 15, 1929, Atlanta, Ga., U.S.—died
April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tenn.) Baptist minister and social activist
who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the
mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership
was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation
of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United
States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics,
such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil
rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Early
years
King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the
tradition of the Southern black ministry: both his father and maternal
grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated,
and King's father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the
prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived
on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,”
the bustling “black Wall Street,” home to some of the
country's largest and most prosperous black businesses and black
churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin
received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.
This
secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing
the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time
when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that
his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because
the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King
in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in
1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned
of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents'
permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from
a second-story window.
In
1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under
a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting
promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college,
however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut;
it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial
experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was
shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes
and whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter
to his parents. “I never [thought] that a person of my race
could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only
deepened King's growing hatred of racial segregation.
At
Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these
were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry,
as his father had urged. King's mentor at Morehouse was the college
president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory
and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King's father.
Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African
American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and
he prodded the black church into social action by criticizing its
emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a
call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated
from Morehouse in 1948.
King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in
Chester, Pa., where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's
philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary
Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree
in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president
of Crozer's student body, which was composed almost exclusively
of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of
recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body
largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected
to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.”
From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a
firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations,
he studied man's relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955)
for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions
of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”
The
Montgomery bus boycott
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a native Alabamian who
was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. They were
married in 1953 and had four children. King had been pastor of the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., slightly more
than a year when the city's small group of civil rights advocates
decided to contest racial segregation on that city's public bus
system following the incident on Dec. 1, 1955, in which Rosa Parks,
an African American woman, had refused to surrender her bus seat
to a white passenger and as a consequence was arrested for violating
the city's segregation law. Activists formed the Montgomery Improvement
Association to boycott the transit system and chose King as their
leader. He had the advantage of being a young, well-trained man
who was too new in town to have made enemies; he was generally respected,
and it was thought that his family connections and professional
standing would enable him to find another pastorate should the boycott
fail.
In
his first speech to the group as its president, King declared:
We
have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown
an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers
the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we
come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient
with anything less than freedom and justice.
These
words introduced to the country a fresh voice, a skillful rhetoric,
an inspiring personality, and in time a dynamic new doctrine of
civil struggle. Although King's home was dynamited and his family's
safety threatened, he continued to lead the boycott until, one year
and a few weeks later, the city's buses were desegregated.
The
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Recognizing
the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful Montgomery
action, King set about organizing the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base of operation throughout the
South, as well as a national platform from which to speak. King lectured
in all parts of the country and discussed race-related issues with
religious and civil rights leaders at home and abroad. In February
1959 he and his party were warmly received by India's Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru and others; as the result of a brief discussion with
followers of Gandhi about the Gandhian concepts of peaceful noncompliance
(satyagraha), King became increasingly convinced that nonviolent resistance
was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their
struggle for freedom. King also looked to Africa for inspiration.
“The liberation struggle in Africa has been the greatest single
international influence on American Negro students,” he wrote.
“Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can
break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break
Jim Crow.”
In
1960 King and his family moved to his native city of Atlanta, where
he became co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
At this post he devoted most of his time to the SCLC and the civil
rights movement, declaring that the “psychological moment
has come when a concentrated drive against injustice can bring great,
tangible gains.” His thesis was soon tested as he agreed to
support the sit-in demonstrations undertaken by local black college
students. In late October he was arrested with 33 young people protesting
segregation at the lunch counter in an Atlanta department store.
Charges were dropped, but King was sentenced to Reidsville State
Prison Farm on the pretext that he had violated his probation on
a minor traffic offense committed several months earlier. The case
assumed national proportions, with widespread concern over his safety,
outrage at Georgia's flouting of legal forms, and the failure of
Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower to intervene. King was released only
upon the intercession of Democratic presidential candidate John
F. Kennedy—an action so widely publicized that it was felt
to have contributed substantially to Kennedy's slender election
victory eight days later.
In
the years from 1960 to 1965, King's influence reached its zenith.
Handsome, eloquent, and doggedly determined, King quickly caught
the attention of the news media, particularly of the producers of
that budding medium of social change—television. He understood
the power of television to nationalize and internationalize the
struggle for civil rights, and his well-publicized tactics of active
nonviolence (sit-ins, protest marches) aroused the devoted allegiance
of many African Americans and liberal whites in all parts of the
country, as well as support from the administrations of Presidents
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But there were also notable failures,
as in Albany, Ga. (1961–62), when King and his colleagues
failed to achieve their desegregation goals for public parks and
other facilities.
The letter from the Birmingham jail
In Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of 1963, King's campaign to end
segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practices drew nationwide
attention when police turned dogs and fire hoses on the demonstrators.
King was jailed along with large numbers of his supporters, including
hundreds of schoolchildren. His supporters did not, however, include
all the black clergy of Birmingham, and he was strongly opposed by
some of the white clergy who had issued a statement urging African
Americans not to support the demonstrations. From the Birmingham jail,
King wrote a letter of great eloquence in which he spelled out his
philosophy of nonviolence:
You
may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and
so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?” You are quite
right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose
of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such
a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly
refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.
Near
the end of the Birmingham campaign, in an effort to draw together
the multiple forces for peaceful change and to dramatize to the
country and to the world the importance of solving the U.S. racial
problem, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the
historic March on Washington. On Aug. 28, 1963, an interracial assembly
of more than 200,000 gathered peaceably in the shadow of the Lincoln
Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law.
Here the crowds were uplifted by the emotional strength and prophetic
quality of King's famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in
which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers.
The
rising tide of civil rights agitation produced, as King had hoped,
a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, authorizing the federal government
to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing
discrimination in publicly owned facilities, as well as in employment.
That eventful year was climaxed by the award to King of the Nobel
Peace Prize in Oslo in December. “I accept this award today
with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future
of mankind,” said King in his acceptance speech. “I
refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness' of man's present
nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal
‘oughtness' that forever confronts him.”
Challenges
of the final years
The first signs of opposition to King's tactics from within the
civil rights movement surfaced during the March 1965 demonstrations
in Selma, Ala., which were aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal
voting-rights law that would provide legal support for the enfranchisement
of African Americans in the South. King organized an initial march
from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery but did not
lead it himself. The marchers were turned back by state troopers
with nightsticks and tear gas. He was determined to lead a second
march, despite an injunction by a federal court and efforts from
Washington to persuade him to cancel it. Heading a procession of
1,500 marchers, black and white, he set out across Pettus Bridge
outside Selma until the group came to a barricade of state troopers.
But, instead of going on and forcing a confrontation, he led his
followers to kneel in prayer and then unexpectedly turned back.
This decision cost King the support of many young radicals who were
already faulting him for being too cautious. The suspicion of an
“arrangement” with federal and local authorities—vigorously
but not entirely convincingly denied—clung to the Selma affair.
The country was nevertheless aroused, resulting in the passage of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Throughout the nation, impatience with the lack of greater substantive
progress encouraged the growth of black militancy. Especially in the
slums of the large Northern cities, King's religious philosophy of
nonviolence was increasingly questioned. The rioting in the Watts
district of Los Angeles in August 1965 demonstrated the depth of unrest
among urban African Americans. In an effort to meet the challenge
of the ghetto, King and his forces initiated a drive against racial
discrimination in Chicago at the beginning of the following year.
The chief target was to be segregation in housing. After a spring
and summer of rallies, marches, and demonstrations, an agreement was
signed between the city and a coalition of African Americans, liberals,
and labour organizations, calling for various measures to enforce
the existing laws and regulations with respect to housing. But this
agreement was to have little effect; the impression remained that
King's Chicago campaign was nullified partly because of the opposition
of that city's powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, and partly because
of the unexpected complexities of Northern racism.
In
Illinois and Mississippi alike, King was now being challenged and
even publicly derided by young black-power enthusiasts. Whereas
King stood for patience, middle-class respectability, and a measured
approach to social change, the sharp-tongued, blue jean-clad young
urban radicals stood for confrontation and immediate change. In
the latter's eyes, the suit-wearing, calm-spoken civil rights leader
was irresponsibly passive and old beyond his years (King was in
his 30s)—more a member of the other side of the generation
gap than their revolutionary leader. Malcolm X went so far as to
call King's tactics “criminal”: “Concerning nonviolence,
it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the
constant victim of brutal attacks.”
In
the face of mounting criticism, King broadened his approach to include
concerns other than racism. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church
in New York City and again on the 15th at a mammoth peace rally
in that city, he committed himself irrevocably to opposing U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War. Once before, in early January 1966,
he had condemned the war, but official outrage from Washington and
strenuous opposition within the black community itself had caused
him to relent. He next sought to widen his base by forming a coalition
of the poor of all races that would address itself to economic problems
such as poverty and unemployment. It was a version of populism—seeking
to enroll janitors, hospital workers, seasonal labourers, and the
destitute of Appalachia, along with the student militants and pacifist
intellectuals. His endeavours along these lines, however, did not
engender much support in any segment of the population.
Meanwhile,
the strain and changing dynamics of the civil rights movement had
taken a toll on King, especially in the final months of his life.
“I'm frankly tired of marching. I'm tired of going to jail,”
he admitted in 1968. “Living every day under the threat of
death, I feel discouraged every now and then and feel my work's
in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”
King's plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were interrupted
in the spring of 1968 by a trip to Memphis, Tenn., in support of a
strike by that city's sanitation workers. In the opinion of many of
his followers and biographers, King seemed to sense his end was near.
As King prophetically told a crowd at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis
on April 3, the night before he died, “I've seen the promised
land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight
that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” The next
day, while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel,
where he and his associates were staying, King was killed by a sniper's
bullet. The killing sparked riots and disturbances in over 100 cities
across the country. On March 10, 1969, the accused assassin, a white
man, James Earl Ray, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced
to 99 years in prison.
Ray
later recanted his confession, claiming lawyers had coerced him
into confessing and that he was the victim of a conspiracy. In a
surprising turn of events, members of the King family eventually
came to Ray's defense. King's son Dexter met with the reputed assassin
in March 1997 and then publicly joined Ray's plea for a reopening
of his case. When Ray died on April 23, 1998, Coretta Scott King
declared, “America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray's
trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination…as
well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray's innocence.”
Although the U.S. government conducted several investigations into
the murder of King and each time concluded that Ray was the sole
assassin, the killing remains a matter of controversy.
-
David L. Lewis
Historical significance and legacy
In the years after his death, King remained the most widely known
African American leader of his era. His stature as a major historical
figure was confirmed by the successful campaign to establish a national
holiday in his honour in the United States and by the building of
a King memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln
Memorial, the site of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech
in 1963. Many states and municipalities have enacted King holidays,
authorized public statues and paintings of him, and named streets,
schools, and other entities for him. These efforts to honour King
have focused more on his role as a civil rights advocate than on
his controversial speeches, during his final year, condemning American
intervention in Vietnam and calling for the Poor People's Campaign.
The
King holiday campaign overcame forceful opposition, with critics
citing FBI surveillance files suggesting that King was an adulterous
radical influenced by communists. Although the release of these
files during the 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act fueled
the public debate over King's legacy, the extensive archives that
now exist document King's life and thought and have informed numerous
serious studies offering balanced and comprehensive perspectives.
Two major books featuring King—David J. Garrow's Bearing the
Cross (1986) and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters (1988)—won
Pulitzer Prizes. Subsequent books and articles reaffirmed King's
historical significance while portraying him as a complex figure:
flawed, fallible, and limited in his control over the mass movements
with which he was associated, yet also a visionary leader who was
deeply committed to achieving social justice through nonviolent
means.
Although the idea of a King national holiday did not gain significant
congressional support until the late 1970s, efforts to commemorate
King's life began almost immediately after his assassination. In 1968
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced a King holiday bill. The
idea gradually began to attract political support once the newly formed
Congressional Black Caucus included the holiday in its reform agenda.
Coretta Scott King also played a central role in building popular
support for the King holiday campaign while serving as founding president
of the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent
Social Change (later renamed the King Center), which became one of
the major archives of King's papers.
Despite
the overall conservative trend in American politics in the 1980s,
which might have been expected to work against recognition of the
efforts of a controversial activist, King holiday advocates gained
political support by portraying him as a symbol of the country's
progress in race relations. Musician Stevie Wonder contributed to
the campaign by writing and recording “Happy Birthday,”
a popular tribute to King. In 1983 Coretta Scott King and Stevie
Wonder participated in the 20th Anniversary March on Washington,
which drew a bigger crowd than the original march.
After
the House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favour of the King
holiday bill sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy, Pres. Ronald Reagan
put aside his initial doubts and signed the legislation on Nov.
3, 1983, establishing Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, to be celebrated
annually on the third Monday in January. Coretta Scott King also
succeeded in gaining congressional approval to establish a King
Federal Holiday Commission to plan annual celebrations, beginning
Jan. 20, 1986, that would encourage “Americans to reflect
on the principles of racial equality and nonviolent social change
espoused by Dr. King.”
Celebration
of the King national holiday did not end contention over King's
legacy, but his status as an American icon became more widely accepted
over time. The revelation during the early 1990s that King had plagiarized
some of his academic writings and the occasional controversies involving
his heirs did little to undermine recognition of King's enduring
impact on the country. Even before the first King national holiday,
members of King's fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, had proposed a permanent
memorial in Washington, D.C. By the end of the 20th century, that
proposal had secured governmental approval for the site on the Tidal
Basin, near the Mall. In 2000 an international design competition
ended with the selection of a proposal by ROMA Design Group. To
build and maintain the memorial, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National
Memorial Project Foundation eventually raised more than $100 million.
Commemorations of King's life were also held in other countries,
and in 2009 a congressional delegation traveled to India to mark
the 50th anniversary of King's pilgrimage to what he called the
“Land of Gandhi.”
Assessment
As with the lives of other major historical figures, King's life has
been interpreted in new ways by successive generations of scholars,
many of whom have drawn attention to the crucial role of local black
leaders in the African American protest movements of the 1950s and
'60s. Recognizing that grassroots activists such as Rosa Parks, Fred
Shuttlesworth, and others prepared the way for King's rise to national
prominence, biographers and historians have questioned the view that
Southern black protest movements relied on King's charismatic guidance.
Nonetheless, studies of King continue to acknowledge his distinctive
leadership role. For example, though he often downplayed his contribution
to the Montgomery bus boycott, King's inspirational leadership and
his speeches helped to transform a local protest over bus seating
into a historically important event. More generally, studies of King
have suggested that his most significant contribution to the modern
African American freedom struggle was to link black aspirations to
transcendent, widely shared democratic and Christian ideals. While
helping grassroots leaders mobilize African Americans for sustained
mass struggles, he inspired participants to believe that their cause
was just and consistent with traditional American egalitarian values.
King also appealed to the consciences of all Americans, thus building
popular support for civil rights reform. His strategy of emphasizing
nonviolent protest and interracial cooperation enabled him to fight
effectively against the Southern system of legalized racial segregation
and discrimination, but it also proved inadequate during his final
years as he sought to overcome racial and economic problems that were
national in scope.
-
Clayborne Carson
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