Martin Luther King

Background

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia to Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King’s given name at birth was Michael King, which was also his father’s original name, but after a period of gradual transitioning by the elder King, he changed both his and his son’s names in 1934.

King was a middle child, between older sister Christine King Farris and younger brother A.D. King. He sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the film “Gone with the Wind” and enjoyed singing and music. When King was a child, he befriended a white boy whose father owned a business near his family’s home. When the boys were six, they started school: King attended one for African Americans and his friend went to one specifically for white children. Their friendship ended because the boy’s father didn’t want his son playing with a black child.

In 1955, Dr. King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology at Boston University, with a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” While pursuing his doctoral studies, King worked as an assistant minister at Boston’s historic Twelfth Baptist Church with Reverend William Hunter Hester, who was an old friend of King’s father and a huge influence on the young man. Also in 1955, Claudette Colvin, a fifteen year-old black schoolgirl in Montgomery, and a few months later Rosa Parks both refused to give up their seats on busses to white men. This lead to the Montgomery bus boycott, urged and planned by Edgar Daniel Nixon and led by King. His role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.