Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a key figure in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King, the son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., was an African American church leader who advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. He led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination, inspired by his Christian beliefs and Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent activism. He is among the most important historical figures in America.
King marched and led marches for voting rights, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and later became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's first president (SCLC). He led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, as president of the SCLC, and helped organize some of the nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. King led the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were pivotal legislative victories for the civil rights movement.
The SCLC used nonviolent protest tactics with some success by strategically selecting protest methods and locations. Several dramatic standoffs occurred with segregationist authorities, who occasionally became violent. King was imprisoned several times. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), saw King as a radical and subjected him to the FBI's COINTELPRO program (Counter Intelligence Program) beginning in 1963. FBI agents spied on him, secretly recorded him, and investigated him for possible communist ties. In 1964, the FBI sent King a threatening anonymous letter, which he mistook for an attempt to force him to commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial inequality. He helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. In his final years, he broadened his opposition to poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War. When King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, he was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C. called the Poor People's Campaign. His death sparked national mourning as well as riots in a number of American cities. In 1977, King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2003, the Congressional Gold Medal. Beginning in 1971, cities and states across the United States declared Martin Luther King Jr. Day a holiday; the holiday was enacted at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the United States have been renamed in his honor, and Washington State's most populous county has been renamed after him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on Washington's National Mall was dedicated in 2011.
