The story of Martin Luther King, Jr Essay

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of Michael King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. His father was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and changed his name to Martin Luther King, Sr. in honor of the German Protestant religious leader Martin Luther. Martin Luther King, Sr. also fought for equal rights. Young Martin entered a public school at age 5, and although his parents always tried, they could not completely protect him from racial discrimination and segregation. In May, 1941, Martin's grandmother died of a heart attack. This was an awful event because he was at a parade when this happened, even though his parents told him not to go. As a result, he jumped from a second story window at his house, where he apparently attempted to commit suicide. He later attended Booker T. Washington High School, where he was a fast learning student. He skipped his freshman and junior years, and entered Morehouse College at the incredibly young age of 15.
Martin Luther King, Jr. began to follow in his father's footsteps by attending the liberal Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1948. During his last year in seminary, the president of Morehouse College, Benjamin E. Mays, encouraged him to view Christianity as a force for social change. For his doctoral study, Martin decided to go to Boston College. During this time, he met Coretta Scott, and married her on June 18, 1953. In 1954, he became a pastor for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama. He completed his Ph.D. and got his degree in 1955, at the age of 25. Later on, Martin and Coretta Scott had 4 children, Yolanda King, Bernice King, Dexter Scott King, and Martin Luther King III.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was fined $10 and was given a $4 court fee. On this same night, E.D. Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter, Martin Luther King, Jr., and local civil rights activists met to discuss a city wide bus boycott. This meant that every day African Americans would have to walk to work, until the boycott ended and African Americans were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted. The group decided to form the Montgomery Improvement Association to fight against the arrest. This boycott lasted for over a year. King's protest strategy involved the mobilization of black churches and white support. He also followed Mahatma Gandhi's ways of peaceful protest and nonviolence. Finally, in late 1965, Montgomery courts banned segregated public transportation. This victory was a major key in the civil rights movement and the fight for equality. In January of 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and 60 others met in Atlanta to form the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Interrogation to help fight segregation in the South. The name later change