Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Baptist Minister -

User of nonviolence,

Marches and sit-ins.

(Photo by Wikipedia.com)

20 Fun Facts on Martin Luther King Jr:

1. Michael King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia to Reverend Michael King Sr. and Alberta King.
2. He was an African American Baptist Minister, activist, leader of the Civil Rights Movement, one of the most memorable speakers, and an author.
3. As a child, he grew up with Bible stories from his Grandmother Jennie, and his father made him and his siblings read from the Bible frequently too.
4. While playing with his brother, A.D. one time, his brother slid into his banister hitting into their grandmother and knocking her out cold. As a result, King jumped out of the window attempting suicide because he blamed himself and thought she was dead. After learning that his grandmother was alive and up again, he rose from the ground afterward.
5. By the age of 5, he memorized and sang hymns from the Bible. His favorite was "I want to be more and more like Jesus."
6. He was 13-years-old when he became the youngest Assistant Manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal in 1942. 
7.  King had also skipped 9th grade the same year and he enrolled at Booker T. Washington High School maintaining a B-plus average while attending.
8. During his junior year, on April 13, 1944, he gave his first speech during an oratical contest, sponsored by the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World in Dublin, Georgia.
9. At 15 in 1944, he passed the entrance examination to Morehouse College and became a college student in that fall season.
10. He led and also participated in marches to fight for the rights of African Americans to vote, labor rights, and other civil rights. He fought against racism, discrimination, segregation, and more.
11. He was one of the founders of the civil rights organization named National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
12. In 1955, he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott inspired by Claudette Colvin and Rosa Park's earlier incidents on a Montgomery bus downtown because for now giving up their seats to white people. 
13. In 1957, he founded along with other civil rights activists, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and became the first President of the organization. That year, he made his first address to a national audience during the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.
14. During one of his book signings on September 20, 1958, in Blumstein's department store in Harlem, an African American woman named Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener almost killing him.
15. He was affected and being forced by the FBI with their COINTELPRO operations for over 5 years of surveilling him and his SCLC activities due to fear from the leaders of the FBI. They intended to blame him for the violence and crime occurring in the surrounding areas.
16. He was arrested after participating in a sit-in that took place on October 19 as a response to the 1960 Presidential Election campaign when no changes had occurred in the segregation along with the others who were inside of the restaurant too. He was transferred to a maximum-security state prison on October 25 to four months of hard labor. 
17. The SCLC organized the Children's Crusade in hopes that the Burmingham Police Department wouldn't attack the protestors with children involved. Instead, the police officers used water jets and dogs to attack the protestors sparking a change to be done with the Jim Crow Laws.
18. On August 28, 1963, King along with the other 5 from the "Big 6" major leaders of the Civil Rights Movement organized the March on Washington for jobs and freedom where he made his "I Have a Dream Speech". The March made demands in hopes of providing African Americans opportunities to have their civil rights and they were successful even though John F. Kennedy was not in support of the movement beforehand.
19. In December 1964, SCLC joined up with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC - seen as a more radical organization compared to the SCLC) and other organizations in Selma, Alabama to work on voting rights. On March 7, 1965, the organizations marched from Selma to Montgomery when Bloody Sunday occurred at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the protestors were attacked by the State Patrol and were brutally beaten. Martin Luther King was not at this event, but his disciple and civil rights colleague, John Lewis, was.
20. He was assassinated in 1968 at the hotel he was staying in after he did his speech in Memphis, Tennessee.

Info from Wikipedia.com & thekingcenter.org.

A piece from MLK's "I Have a Dream" Speech:

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The march made specific demands: 

• An end to racial segregation in public schools
• Meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment
• Protection of civil rights workers from police brutality
• A $2 minimum wage for all workers (equivalent to $17 in 2019)
• Self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by a congressional committee.

To keep up with expenses as an activist and leader, King wrote several books:

• Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)
• Strength to Love (1963)
• Why Can't We Wait (1963)
• Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
• The Trumpet of Conscious (1968)

You can find more of his works on this site and purchase:
https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/books-bibliography/

Read one of his famous speeches here A Time to Break Silence:

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm