Discovering Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist minister and activist

Each year when the third Monday of January rolls around, students know that they get a day off school. Most know it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. However, the question remains, does this generation of students know why it is relevant to celebrate this man?

King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, as Michael King Jr. He grew up in a middle-class, religious family. Both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. While he had a normal happy childhood, learning to play the piano from his mom, receiving a public education, even playing high school football, King quickly learned the harsh realities of prejudices that were common in the South. At the age of six, he had white playmates until schools became segregated, and King was informed by his friend that his parents would no longer allow them to play together.

Before going to Morehouse College in Atlanta at age 15, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut. Being away from the segregation that was taking place in the South, he was shocked at the peacefulness he found between the mixed races. Writing a letter home to his parents, he stated, “Negroes and whites go [to] the same church. I never (thought) that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” He noted that this summer experience in the North deepened his growing hatred of racial segregation.

At Morehouse, King studied medicine and law but made the decision his senior year to enter the ministry. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948. Spending the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, 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.

King met his wife, Coretta Scott, while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. They married in 1953, and together they had four children. In 1955 when Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to surrender her seat on a public bus to a white passenger, which violated the city of Montgomery, Alabama’s law, King was chosen to lead the activist group, Montgomery Improvement Association, to boycott the transit system. Thus, started King’s years of being an activist to stop segregation in the United States.

During the massive march on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, King gave what would become one of history’s most notable speeches, “I Have a Dream.” In this speech, he said, “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.” He went on to say, “… one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” He concluded his 16-minute speech by saying, “And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. It would be a 32-year fight to pass the bill to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a Federal Holiday.