Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his death in 1968. King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire.

• 1929 - King is born on January 15, in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Alberta Williams King.
• 1939 - King sang with his church choir at the Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind, and he enjoyed singing and music. His mother was an accomplished organist and choir leader who took him to various churches to sing, and he received attention for singing "I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus". King later became a member of the junior choir in his church.
• 1942 - King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He became known for his public-speaking ability and was part of the school's debate team. When King was 13 years old, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. During his junior year, he won first prize in an oratorical contest sponsored by the Negro Elks Club in Dublin, Georgia.
• 1947 - The 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. He had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity.
• 1948 - King graduated at the age of 19 from Morehouse with a B.A. in sociology.
• 1951 - He then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.Div. degree.
• 1954 - King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
• 1955 - June 5, he received his Ph.D. degree in doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University.
• 1957 - King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He led the SCLC until his death.
• 1958 - September 20, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem when he narrowly escaped death. Izola Curry—a mentally ill black woman who thought that King was conspiring against her with communists—stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. King underwent emergency surgery.
• 1959 - He published a short book called The Measure of A Man, which contained his sermons "What is Man?" and "The Dimensions of a Complete Life." The sermons argued for man's need for God's love and criticized the racial injustices of Western civilization.
• 1960 - 1965: King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
• 1962 - King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order.
• 1963 - The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it began tapping King's telephone line. Kennedy was concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives.
• 1964 - February 6, New York City. King delivered the inaugural speech of a lecture series initiated at the New School called "The American Race Crisis." No audio record of his speech has been found, but in August 2013, almost 50 years later, the school discovered an audiotape with 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that followed King's address.
  In March, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's then-controversial movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been affiliated with the NAACP but was forced out of the organization for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics.
  In December, King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, where the SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.
• 1966 - After several successes in the south, King, Bevel, and others in the civil rights organizations took the movement to the North, with Chicago as their first destination.
• 1968 - King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.
• 1968 - King was fatally shot by James Earl Ray at 6:01 p.m., April 4, as he stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities.