Nobel
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Nobel |
Martin Luther King |
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
(January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later
had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure
as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931;
his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death
Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public
schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he
received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro
institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had been
graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary
in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior
class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he
enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for
the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955 In Boston he met and
married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic
attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for
members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading
organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December,
1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration
of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar
Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382
days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had
declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and
whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was
arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the
same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now
burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from
Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period
between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over
twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and
action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these
years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the
attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of
conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a
manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the
registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington,
D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a
Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for
President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and
assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named
Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the
symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have
received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced
that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the
civil rights movement.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room
in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with
striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Selected Bibliography
Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present, pp. 106-107. Chicago,
Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.
Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King,
Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.
I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures. New
York, Time Life Books, 1968.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man. Philadelphia. The
Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love. New York, Harper & Row,
1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled "Pilgrimage to
Nonviolence."
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
New York, Harper, 1958.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper
& Row, 1968.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
New York, Harper & Row, 1967.
King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can't Wait. New York, Harper & Row,
1963.
"Man of the Year", Time, 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.
"Martin Luther King, Jr.", in Current Biography Yearbook
1965, ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.
Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther
King, Jr. New York, Harper, 1959.
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.