Martin Luther King Jr. was a very passionate and dedicated civil rights activist and minister. He used his knowledge and dedication to work to unify a nation separated by race. During his thirteen years of influence on the Civil Rights Movement in America, which began in December, 1955, and ended on April 4, 1968, he helped the African American race obtain more progress towards gaining racial equality than any of the years previous. He is widely deemed to be America’s foremost promoter of nonviolence and one of the world’s most substantial nonviolent leaders.
Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second child of three to Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. At age five, his father travelled to Germany and was heavily impacted by Martin
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Martin Luther King Jr. grew up in a very prosperous black neighborhood. He attended the segregated Booker T. Washington High School, where he skipped ninth and eleventh grades. In 1944, at the age of fifteen, he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, a family alma mater of the two generations before him. In 1948, while attending Morehouse College, he earned his degree in sociology. During King’s time at Morehouse, he rebelled against his father’s rules, drinking beer and partying while in college. He even had an affair with a white woman, but it was so difficult to maintain a relationship with a person of a different color during the time that the two had to break it off. Martin Luther King Jr. was not interested in following in his family’s footsteps in ministry until he was mentored by Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays in his last year attending the school. Mays was a very influential theologian and an outspoken supporter of racial equality. He pushed King to use religion, specifically Christianity, to potentially bring about social change. Later in 1948, King would begin school at Crozer Theological Seminary