Martin Luther King Who was Martin Luther King? If I were to ask you, you would probably tell me he was a great man. But why? Well, you would explain, he was a pastor, he believed in peace, but most importantly, he was a powerful leader in the African-American movement that led to equality for all. But what did King believe? Well, you consider, he was a Baptist preacher, he loved Mohandas Gandhi’s ideas of peace, and he believed in a free nation. But who was he, really? What did he believe about God? How did being peaceful help him in a time of fighting? If he hadn’t been a Christian, how would the civil rights movement been different?
Martin Luther King had two generations before him that were involved in ministry. His father, Michael King,
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Needing someone who would be a full time homemaker and partner in ministry, it took him some time to convince Coretta, whose dream was to be a concert singer, but in the end she gave in. While King was writing his dissertation, he decided he wanted to spend his time as a minister before saying ‘yes’ to all the teacher positions being offered him and becoming caught up in the academic world. Though his father had asked him to become Ebenezer Baptist Church’s assistant pastor, King didn’t want to live under his father’s shadow. He applied to several churches and in 1954 he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and became Dexter Avenue Baptist Church’s full time minister.
Everyone loved King’s way of speaking. His sermons were made up with questions from poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers, giving his audience the opportunity to really think about what he was saying. King wouldn’t just talk AT his listeners, he talked TO them. For 30-40 minutes he would preach, from memory. It wasn’t very long before he started to see the value in emotional ‘outbursts’ from his listeners, though he had had different feelings about it in his past, he now realized it helped his listeners with their anger and frustrations with the way they were treated by