Martin Luther King Jr.

A Baptist minister, and the leader of the American civil rights movement.

He was born in Atlanta on the fifteenth of January 1929, the son and grandson of ministers of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He went to Morehouse at fifteen, took a doctorate at Boston, and married Coretta Scott. He was twenty-five when he took his first pulpit at Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, and twenty-six when a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the city's black population stopped riding the buses for three hundred and eighty-one days.

He led it, and what followed it, for thirteen years. He was arrested twenty-nine times. He was stabbed in a Harlem bookshop in 1958 by a woman who was ill, and the blade came so close to his aorta that a surgeon told him a sneeze would have killed him. His house was bombed with his wife and baby inside it. He spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to a quarter of a million people, and was given the Nobel Peace Prize the following year at thirty-five - the youngest man who had ever received it. He gave the money away.

He was in Memphis in the spring of 1968 for the dustmen's strike, and he was tired. He had been told for years that he would be killed and had stopped arguing about it. The night before he died he told a hall at Mason Temple that he had been to the mountaintop, that he had seen the promised land, and that he might not get there with them.

He was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at one minute past six the following evening. He was thirty-nine years old.

His wife Coretta and their children Yolanda, Martin, Dexter and Bernice.