1. On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta Georgia. When Martin was born the doctor who delivered Martin put “Michael” on the birth certificate instead of “Martin.” Martin had not realized this until he needed a passport many years later.
2. When Martin Luther King Jr. was a child, he had two siblings. An older sister and a younger brother. His sister’s name was Willie Christine King and his younger brother’s name was Alfred Daniel Williams Kings. Martin got married on June 18, 1953 to Coretta Scott and they got married on his mother’s lawn. Martin’s father was a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, was famous for his amazing sermons. Martin’s great-grandfather, Willis Williams, was a slave-era preacher.
3. Martin’s dad was very involved in alcoholism and it became a problem. He grew up very very poor. Eventually, his dad straightened up and graduated both high school and college which inspired Martin to write a book called “Stride Toward Freedom.”
The first real discrimination situation that was introduced to Martin was when he was in pre-school and he was playing with two white children and the parents of those kids said to him that he was not allowed to play with their kids anymore. When Martin went to Marehouse, he majored in sociology and minored in English. These subjects helped him reach his full potential as a speaker. When Martin was seventeen he decided that he wanted to be involved in the ministry. So his dad, being a pastor, let Martin preach at his church. Word got out that Martin was going to prach and it brought in more people than the chapel could hold. When Martin was nineteen he graduated from Marehouse and continued to study at Crozer Theology Seminary from 1948 to 1951. He was the first black student to be elected student body president.
4. When Martin Luther King Jr. was a junior at Marehouse, he decided that he wanted to become a Baptist minister. People were not surprised about his decision because of his background and upbringing. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t give very much information about his reasons for his decision and it has ‘puzzled’ his biographers. The influences of his father and also ministers at Marehouse were powerful inducements to his ministry. Even though they might have pushed him in the direction he ended up going in, their example alone is not sufficient enough to explain his decision.
5. On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks said no to a bus driver who told her that she was not allowed to sit in the front of the bus and that she had to move to the back. This started the boycott that Martin Luther King Jr. lead and thus became a change in history.
6. In 1958 Martin was stabbed by a black woman in the chest and had to have surgery to secure his life.
Martin was invited by 75 students in 1960 to a segregated lunch. Everyone was then arrested , including Martin! When Martin protested, it made national headlines. The 75 students were set free but Martin wasn’t. Martin was locked up because of a tiny traffic violation.
7. In January of 1954 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, inbited Martin to preach a trial sermon. The people who listened to that sermon liked how Martin thought and that’s why they gave him this opportunity. The Kings then stayed in their home in Montgomery for the next fifteen months. Boston University is where Martin received his Ph.D. Montgomery is also the place where Martin and his wife had their first child, Yolanda Denise (Yoki), on November 17, 1955. Martin started to get extremely popular after Birmingham. People were listening to what he had to say and his views on his nonviolent civil rights strategy was working.
8. Martin Luther King Jr. was never old.
9. Once Martin died there were countless amounts of riots that had broken out in over 100 American cities; thousands of people were injured, almost fifty people were brutally killed, and on top of that over twenty thousand people were arrested. Grief, shock, and introspective questions were articulated by millions around the world. The fact that the archtype of nonviolence should meet such a violent and dramatized the very anger in American society that Marin had struggled against. He once wrote, “The oceans of history are made of turbulent by the over-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that persuade that self-defeating path of hate. Love is key to the solution of the problems of the world.”
