Martin Luther King Jr. was an
American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African American Civil Rights
Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights and
his use of nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in
the history of America progressivism.
A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King
led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany,
Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted
national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police
response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he
delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech. There, he established his
reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. He also
established his reputation as a radical, and became an object of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO for the rest of his life. FBI agents
investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital
liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion,
mailed King a threatening anonymous letter that he interpreted as an attempt to
make him commit suicide.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial
inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the
Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year, he took the movement north
to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include
poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967
speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". King was planning a national
occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. King was
assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by
riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted
of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents
persisted for decades after the shooting, and the jury of a 1999 civil trial
found Loyd Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King.
King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Metal
posthumously. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. Federal
Holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his
honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.