Essay, Research Paper: Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King
On January 15,1929 Michael Luther King Jr., which was later changed to Martin, was
born. His father Michael Luther King was a Baptist minister and his mother was a school
teacher named Alberta King. In 1948 King graduated from Morehouse College in
Atlanta, Georgia. with a Bachelor of Arts. After King s successful campaign to achieve
the desegregation of public facilities in Birmington, Alabama in 1965, he concentrated
most of his time and efforts on the voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama to
Montgomery, Alabama in March 1963.
King inspired and planned the poor peoples campaign, a march on Washington
DC, in 1968 to show the relationship of poverty to urban violence. But he did not live to
take part in it. Early in 1968 he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike of
Poorly paid sanitation workers. There, on April 4, he was assassinated by a sniper named,
James Earl Ray. King s death shocked the nation and was the result of a lot of rioting by
blacks in many cities. He was buried in Atlanta under a monument inscribed with the
final words of his famous I have a Dream address . Which was taken from an old slave
song, the inscription read: Free at Last,/Free at Last,/Thank God Almighty,/I m Free at
Last.
Even our current president Bill Clinton had this quote to say about Martin Luther
King Jr.: "Thirty-four years ago the man whose life we celebrate today spoke to us down
there at the other end of this mall in words that moved the conscience of a nation. Like a
prophet of old he told of his dream that one day America would rise up and treat all its
citizens as equals before the law and in the heart. Martin Luther King's dream was the
American Dream. His quest is our quest. The ceaseless striving to live out our true creed.
Our history has been built on such dreams and labors. By that statement which our
president made is an example of the type of impact that King had on the civil rights
movement in the United States, the affect that this man had was that he helped changed
the way of life for the minority.
His bravery and determination prevailed and he made his dream of every one
having rights come true. If King didn't do the things that he did life aswe know it
probably would be a lot different from the way that it presently is. King also showed us
that there was another way besides the traditional violence to get things changed, I think
that it s a shame that a man of such greatness had to die at such a young age, today we
could only imagine the other things that he may have accomplished if he had not been killed.