Essay, Research Paper: Martin Luther King

On January 15,1929 Michael Luther King Jr., which was later changed to Martin, wasborn. His father Michael Luther King was a Baptist minister and his mother was a schoolteacher named Alberta King. In 1948 King graduated from Morehouse College inAtlanta, Georgia. with a Bachelor of Arts. After King s successful campaign to achievethe desegregation of public facilities in Birmington, Alabama in 1965, he concentratedmost of his time and efforts on the voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama toMontgomery, Alabama in March 1963. King inspired and planned the poor peoples campaign, a march on WashingtonDC, in 1968 to show the relationship of poverty to urban violence. But he did not live totake part in it. Early in 1968 he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike ofPoorly 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 byblacks in many cities. He was buried in Atlanta under a monument inscribed with thefinal words of his famous I have a Dream address . Which was taken from an old slavesong, the inscription read: Free at Last,/Free at Last,/Thank God Almighty,/I m Free atLast. 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 downthere at the other end of this mall in words that moved the conscience of a nation. Like aprophet of old he told of his dream that one day America would rise up and treat all itscitizens as equals before the law and in the heart. Martin Luther King's dream was theAmerican 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 ourpresident made is an example of the type of impact that King had on the civil rightsmovement in the United States, the affect that this man had was that he helped changedthe way of life for the minority. His bravery and determination prevailed and he made his dream of every onehaving rights come true. If King didn't do the things that he did life aswe know itprobably would be a lot different from the way that it presently is. King also showed usthat there was another way besides the traditional violence to get things changed, I thinkthat it s a shame that a man of such greatness had to die at such a young age, today wecould only imagine the other things that he may have accomplished if he had not beenkilled.