Martin Luther King, Jr.

Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1965 the American Jewish Committee presented the Reverend Dr. Pesticide use became a major public issue, helped by Carson's April 1963 appearance on a CBS TV special with the soft-spoken Carson in debate with a chemical company spokesman. Their presence nearby has led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination. In their ugly campaign to reduce a brave scientist's protest to a matter of public relations, the chemical interests had only increased public awareness.” [1]. King. As Time Magazine recalls, within a year or so of publication, "all but the most self-serving of Carson's attackers were backing rapidly toward safer ground. Immediately following the shooting, all six agents rushed out of the station and were the first people to administer first-aid to Dr. Silent Spring was positively reviewed by many outside of the agricultural and chemical fields, and it became a runaway best seller both in the USA and overseas.

Using papered-over windows with peepholes cut into them, the agents watched over the scene until MLK was shot. Houghton Mifflin was pressured to suppress the book, but did not succumb. The FBI was assigned to observe King during the appearance he was planning to make on the Lorraine Motel second-floor balcony later that day, and utilized the fire station as a makeshift base. These chemical companies called her unprofessional and even accused of her of being a communist. Across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the rooming house in which James Earl Ray was staying, was an vacant fire station. Scientists, chemical companies and other critics attacked the data and interpretation in the book, and some went further to attack Carson's scientific credentials. United States District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968, be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid - indeed, the whole chemical industry - duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media.

Kelley, et al. Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. Clarence M. As Time Magazine recounted in 1999:. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference v. Even before Silent Spring was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, there was strong opposition to it. Kelley, et al. Silent Spring became a detailed chronicle of the association between wildlife mortality and over-use of pesticides like dieldrin, toxaphene, heptachlor, and DDT, but it was no mere dry recital of the facts and figures: Carson's writing was as lyrical and evocative as it was precise.

Clarence M. Now, as a renowned scientist, she was able to ask for (and receive) the aid of prominent biologists, chemists, pathologists, and entomologists. Lee v. Carson decided it would be more effective to raise the issue in a popular magazine; however, publishers were uninterested, and eventually the project became a book instead. On January 31, 1977, in the cases of Bernard S. The letter asked Carson to use her influence with government authorities to begin an investigation into pesticide use. Finally, the Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the Black Power movement. The four-year task of writing Silent Spring began with a letter from the custodian of a Massachusetts bird sanctuary that had been destroyed by aerial spraying of DDT.

The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Carson explored the theme of environmental connectedness: although a pesticide is aimed at eliminating one organism, its effects are felt throughout the food chain, and what was intended to poison an insect ends up poisoning larger animals and humans. The Bureau distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. Silent Spring was Carson’s first book focused on the environment, and pesticides in particular. Accounts of such behavior also have been provided by King's associates, including close friend Ralph Abernathy. "What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.". FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, demonstrates that he also engaged in numerous extramarital sexual affairs. "The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became," she wrote later, explaining her decision to start researching for what would eventually become her most famous work, Silent Spring.

Later, the focus of the Bureau's investigations shifted to attempting to "discredit" King through revelations regarding his private life. Starting in the mid-1940s, Carson became concerned about the use of newly invented pesticides, especially DDT. The Committee was renamed in 1969 and eventually abolished. This environment was to be a major factor in the choice of her next topic. HUAC later was discredited for its coercion of witnesses and the manner in which it sought to implicate individuals with vague and often sweeping accusations and assumptions of guilt by association. She adopted the boy and, needing a suitable place to raise him, bought a rural property in Maryland. The attempt to smear King as a communist was in keeping with the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot, but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators." Movement leaders countered that voter disenfranchisement, lack of education and employment opportunities, discrimination and vigilante violence were the reasons for the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, and that blacks had the intelligence and motivation to organize on their own. Carson took on that responsibility alongside the continuing one of caring for her mother, who was almost 90 by this time.

For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"—to which Hoover responded by calling King "the most notorious liar in the country.". Family tragedy struck a third time when one of the nieces she had cared for in the 1940s died at the age of 36, leaving a five-year-old orphan son. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. Through 1956 and 1957, Carson worked on a number of projects, and wrote articles for popular magazines. The Bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then-President John F. This severely embarrassed Carson: she was appalled at the film's sensational style and distortion of fact, and disassociated herself from it. The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. It was also a bestseller, winning further awards, and it was made into an Oscar-winning documentary film.

Levison was a man whom the bureau suspected of involvement with the Communist Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). With success came financial security, and Carson was able to give up her job in 1952 to concentrate on writing full time: completing the third volume of her sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea in 1955. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the National Book Award, and resulted in Carson being awarded two honorary doctorates. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Other parts soon appeared in Nature, and Oxford University Press published it in book form as The Sea Around Us. Edgar Hoover, who had deeply detested the civil rights leader. For some time she had been working on material for a second book: it was rejected by fifteen different magazines before The New Yorker serialized parts of it as A Profile of the Sea in 1951.

King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Carson rose within the Bureau (by then transformed into the Fish and Wildlife Service), becoming chief editor of publications in 1949. [9]. It had the misfortune to be released just a month before the Pearl Harbor raid catapulted America into World War II. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner. Several years of working in the evenings resulted in Under the Sea-Wind (1941) which received excellent reviews but was a commercial flop. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. Publishing house Simon & Schuster, impressed by Undersea, contacted Carson and suggested that she expand it into book form.

Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray." [8] King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. (Other sources have it that it was the editor of The Baltimore Sun who made the Atlantic Monthly suggestion - Carson had been supplementing her meager income by writing short articles for that paper for some time.) Carson's family responsibilities further increased that year when her older sister died at the age of 40, and she had to take on responsibility for her two nieces. I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. To Carson's astonishment and delight, it was accepted, and published as Undersea in 1937. .. He suggested that she submit it to the Atlantic Monthly. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks. Early in her career, the head of the Bureau's Division of Scientific Inquiry, who had been instrumental in finding a position for her in the first place, rejected one of Carson's radio scripts because it was "too literary".

[And] within our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. At the Bureau, Carson worked on everything from cookbooks to scientific journals, and became known for her ruthless insistence on high standards of writing. Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted "The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. In spite of the odds, she outscored all other applicants on the exam and in 1936 became only the second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist. Rev. In the process, she had to overcome resistance to the then-radical idea of having a woman sit for the Civil Service exam. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agencies were parties" to the assassination plot.[6] [7]. Bureau of Fisheries as a science writer working on radio scripts.

Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. She took on a part-time position at the U.S. In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King's widow (also a civil rights leader), along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Her financial situation, never satisfactory, became worse in 1932 when her father died, leaving Carson to care for her aging mother; this burden made continued doctoral studies impossible. In 1997 Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial. She continued to study towards her doctoral degree, particularly at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee on June 10, 1977 shortly after Ray testified that he did not shoot King to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.[5] More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary. Carson taught zoology at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland for several years.

Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot. Despite financial difficulties, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University, earning a master's degree in zoology in 1932. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929 with magna cum laude honors. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow (not white) 1966 Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. Her talent for writing would help her in her new field, as she resolved to "make animals in the woods or waters, where they live, as alive to others as they are to me". King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. She originally went to school to study English but switched her major to biology.

Dr. Carson was born in 1907 on a small family farm in the Pittsburgh suburb of Springdale, Pennsylvania. on April 4th. . Green (who, like Ray, had asserted that FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach headed the assassination plot) had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. Silent Spring had an immense effect in the United States, where it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy. After several trips to and from Canada and Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate (allegedly controlled by his mysterious benefactor "Raoul" who reportedly had weeks before while in Birmingham, Alabama ordered Ray to purchase the Remington Gamemaster rifle) in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town--since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-born zoologist and biologist whose landmark book, Silent Spring, is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement.

King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. Visit and experience first-hand the surroundings that made Rachel Carson a fierce and poetic defender of the natural world. According to a former Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led conspiracy to kill Dr. The Rachel Carson Homestead The Rachel Carson Homestead Association was formed in 1975 to preserve and restore this National Register historic site and to offer education programs which advance Rachel Carson's environmental ethic. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation. Silent Spring at 40: Rachel Carson’s classic is not aging well Reason Online, 12 June 2002. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. New York Times obituary.

Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude, he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to that of his shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray, he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. The Mosquito Killer by Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Silent Spring Institute Research on the environment and women's health, especially breast cancer. Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Time magazine's "100 most important people" article on Carson. King had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it while the second-floor bathroom of Ray's rooming house, from where Ray (an average marksman who hadn't fired a rifle since his Army service in the late 1940s) was believed to have fired at King, contained none of Ray's fingerprints at all. RachelCarson.org The life and legacy of Rachel Carson.

Among the claims used to support this assertion are the fact that the Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-06 caliber rifle Ray (a burglar and thief but not a killer or other violent criminal) had allegedly used to shoot Dr. Some speculate Ray had been a patsy much in the way alleged John Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had supposedly been. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had. King," he may have been "partially responsible without knowing it," hinting at a conspiracy.

Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray had been captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave Great Britain on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader.

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. He was pronounced dead several hours later. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the jaw. King was assassinated the next evening, April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I'm not fearing any man. I'm not worried about anything. And so I'm happy tonight.

But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

I just want to do God's will. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. talk about the threats that were out -- what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers...

some began to.. It really doesn't matter what happens now... On April 3, 1968, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd:. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.

The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. Speech in front of his staff.). November 14, 1966.

(Frogmore, S.C. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. with capitalism... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong..

You are messing with captains of industry... You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars.

Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism [4]):. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years.

TIME called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi (a propaganda radio station run by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War)", and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.". King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." [3]. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

On April 4, 1967— exactly one year before his death— King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:. Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice.

Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. It is regarded, along with President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. King's I Have a Dream speech electrified the crowd. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protestors in Washington's history.

More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for the District of Columbia, then governed by congressional committee. As a result, some civil rights activists who felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce on Washington," and members of the Nation of Islam who attended the march faced a temporary suspension.[2].

However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the South and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.

Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, as he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins, NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., Urban League; A.

King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Willie Ricks coined the phrase "Black Power" (widely credited to Stokely Carmichael). This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The second attempt at the march on March 9 was ended when King stopped the procession at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seemed to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand.

The footage of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the nation and aroused a national sense of public outrage. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, but the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. After meeting with President Lyndon B. King, however, was not present.

Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. This day since has become known as Bloody Sunday. The first attempt to march on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organise a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 25, 1965.

King and the SCLC joined forces with SNCC in Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for a number of months. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful protest movement in Albany, in 1961–1962, where divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts; in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in St. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent.

King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out in often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, fair hiring, and other basic civil rights. Indeed, journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that made the Civil Rights Movement the single most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.

King correctly identified that organized, nonviolent protest against the racist system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mahatma Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. The SCLC derived its membership principally from black communities associated with Baptist churches. The organization's nonviolent principles were criticized by the younger, more radical blacks and challenged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) then headed by James Foreman.

King continued to dominate the organization until his death. Following the campaign, King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses. The situation became so tense that King's house was bombed.

The boycott lasted for 381 days. He was a leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott which began when Rosa Parks refused to comply with Jim Crow law and surrender her seat to a white man. In 1954, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The four children all have one thing in common: They have followed their father's footsteps as civil rights activists, although pet issues and opinions differ among the King children.

King and Scott had four children:. The wedding ceremony took place in Scott's parents' house in Marion, Alabama, and was performed by King's father. King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. For further information see authorship issues.

Later, however, scholars at the King Papers project found that King plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation and academic papers, although Boston University did not revoke King's degree. in Systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. He received his Ph.D. His application to Yale Divinity School was rejected, and he graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania [1] with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951.

(Birth records list King's first name as Michael, apparently due to some confusion on the part of the family doctor regarding the true name of his father, who was known as Mike throughout his childhood.) He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948. and Alberta Williams King. Martin Luther King, Sr. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia to the Rev.

. holiday, was established in his honor. A decade and a half after his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King Day, a U.S. history and in the modern history of non-violence, and is considered a hero, peacemaker and martyr by many people around the world.

He is one of the most significant leaders in U.S. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ph.D., (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was a Nobel Laureate, Baptist minister, and African American civil rights activist. Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia). Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia).

Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama). Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama).