Martin Luther King Jr Research Paper

A father or a leader? Martin Luther King Jr. is very well known around the country. People are taught his legacy with the civil rights movement from elementary school all the way to adulthood. There is even a government holiday in remembrance of him. It has been drilled into peoples’ heads that King was an amazing leader that impacted America as a whole. Is this the only thing King would want people to remember him as? Dr. King made it very clear in his letter he wrote in jail and his “I Have a Dream Speech” that he would have wanted everyone to remember him as a great father and clergyman, but scholars seem to remember him more as an African American leader. After reading the two primary sources, it seemed very apparent that King’s family

King being an African American and a leader. I think when asked to talk about who Martin Luther King Jr. was, most people would be likely to mention either he was African American or a leader, or both. I think the secondary sources focus on Martin Luther King Jr.’s race because it was an important aspect of his life. His skin color is what eventually led him to become such an important leader. In the biography, the author starts out by saying that King went to a segregated high school, but then moved on to be the president of his mostly white class at Crozer Theological Seminary (“Martin Luther King Jr.-Facts”). I think the author wants to make this fact known because it leads into more of his later more famous leadership positions. It also makes it very clear to the reader right at the beginning that Dr. King is in fact an African American leader. The author continues by mentioning “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” (“Martin Luther King Jr.-Facts”). The author continues to portray Martin Luther King Jr. as a leader of the civil rights movement, but only briefly mentions that he was a father and a clergyman. Even though Dr. King would not have necessarily been involved with the civil rights movement if he were not African American, he had other important aspects of his identity that recent scholars have chosen not to emphasize. Martin Luther King Jr., “became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure” (“Martin Luther King Jr.-Facts”). This statement helps pull the whole article together by incorporating the details mentioned earlier in the article to show what Dr. King was eventually known as