Background and family
King was innate inside Atlanta, Georgia to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. (Birth records names King's foremost title when Michael, apparently due to a few confusion on the a share of the personal doctor on truth title of his father, world health organization was referred to as Microphone throughout his childhood.) He graduated from either Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948. Late he graduated from either Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania [http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=49210#49210] with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. He received his Ph.D. in Systematic theology from Boston University in 1955. King married Coretta Scott on June 18,1953. A nuptials took place inside Scott's parents' home within Marion, Alabama, and was performed by King's father.

King & Scott got tetrad youngsters: Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama) Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama) Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia) Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)

A foursome tikes a lot use of these tool within green: It use followed their father's footsteps when civil rights militant, although favorite issues & opinions differ among a King babies.

Civil rights activism
Around 1953, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the leader of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott which began when Rosa Parks refused to comply with Jim Crow law and surrender her seat to a white human. A boycott lasted for 381 years. A situation became and so tense that King's home was bombed. King was arrested when you took this campaign, which ended by owning the United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses. Resulting a campaign, King was subservient in the innovation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a class action created to harness a moral authority & organizing power of blacken churches to conduct unbloody protests in the service of civil rights reform. King continued to dominate a organization until his dying. A organization's unbloody lesson were criticized per immature, other radical blacks & challenged per Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) then headed by James Foreman.

A SCLC derived its membership mainly from either blacken communities associated by using Baptist churches. King was an disciple of the philosophies of unbloody civil disobedience used successfully around India by Mahatma Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organized per SCLC. King right identified that unionized, unbloody protest against a racist formulas of southern segregation referred to as Jim Crow would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality & ballot rights. Indeed, journalistic accounts & televised footage of a daily deprivation & indignities suffered by southern blacks, & of segregator violence & harassment of civil rights workers & marchers, produced the wave of sympathetic opinion that manufactured the Civil Rights Movement the single first issue within U.s. politics in the early 1960s. King organized & led marches for blacks' perfect to vote, desegregation, fair hiring, and more basic civil rights. Virtually all one rights were with success enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King & a SCLC applied a lesson of unbloody protest by using dandy profits by strategically finding a method of protest & a pages where protests were carried call at typically striking have-offs by owning segregator authorities. For instance these confrontations turned violent. King & a SCLC were implemental around the stillborn protest movement in Albany, in 1961–1962, where divisions in a melanize community & a cagy, online-subdued response by local government defeated efforts; in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. King & a SCLC joined forces by having SNCC inside Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC got been working in elector registration for the total of months.

Stance on Affirmative Action
Contrary to popular belief, & despite his require the colorblind united states, Martin Luther King Jr. may have supported affirmative action. Among his comments:

""When this issue [compensatory treatment] is raised, occasionally of my friends recoil within horror. A Blackamoor should exist as granted equality, it agree, however should ask for nothing further. On the surface, this appears sensible, however is non naturalistic. For these are conspicuous that whenever a huhuman enters the starting line of a race 3 hundred years when a second man, the number one would stand to perform occasionally unbelievable exploit sequentially to catch higher."

""A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. "

""... for ii centuries a Negroid was enslaved & robbed of any earnings — possible accrued wealth which would keep close at hand been a bequest of his descendent. 100% of Us's wealth now may not adequately compensate its Blackamoor for his centuries of exploitation & humiliation.These are an economic fact that the program like We propose would surely numbers far to a lesser degree any computation of 2 centuries of unpaid remuneration + accumulated interest. In any experience, We don't intend that this program of aid should use just to a Negroid: it should profit the disadvantaged of everthing races."

As one site puts it: "King actually suggested it may exist as necessary to keep close at hand something akin to "discrimination in reverse" as a form of national "atonement" for the bequest of slavery & Jim Crow segregation." [http://www.axiommedia.org/dsmfilmfest/war_for_truth.htm][http://www.laissezfairebooks.com/index.php?deptid=843&parentid=26&stocknumber=CU8994&page=1&itemsperpage=24][http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=687]

Scholars argue whether he advocated affirmative action for the poor, blacks, or both. King himself admitted that the vast majority of the poor were black anyway, implying that he could put his proposed programs in terms of class and not race, while still achieving the end of compensatory treatment, albeit via a more agreeable position. While it may seem that he alternates between advocating socioeconomic and racial affirmative action, the latter predominated. In a Playboy interview he proposes a massive public works project of Depression-Era proportions, the likely grounds for Reagan calling King a near communist. [http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1292][http://www.allanfavish.com/mlking.htm]

The March on Washington
King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, then attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 25, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7, was aborted due to mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day since has become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he had attempted to delay the march until March 8, but the march was carried out against his wishes and without his presence by local civil rights workers. The footage of the police brutality against the protestors was broadcast extensively across the nation and aroused a national sense of public outrage. The second attempt at the march on March 9 was ended when King stopped the procession at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, an action which he seemed to have negotiated with city leaders beforehand. This unexpected action aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, with the agreement and support of President Johnson, and it was during this march that Willie Ricks coined the phrase "Black Power" (widely credited to Stokely Carmichael). King, representing SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Large Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were: Roy Wilkins, NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). For King, this role was another which courted controversy, as he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march. Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed.

The march originally was conceived as an event to dramatize the desperate condition of blacks in the South and a very public opportunity to place organizers' concerns and grievances squarely before the seat of power in the nation's capital. Organizers intended to excoriate and then challenge the federal government for its failure to safeguard the civil rights and physical safety of civil rights workers and blacks, generally, in the South. However, the group acquiesced to presidential pressure and influence, and the event ultimately took on a far less strident tone.

As a result, some civil rights activists who felt it presented an inaccurate, sanitized pageant of racial harmony; Malcolm X called it the "Farce in Wash.," and members of the Nation of Islam who attended the march faced a temporary suspension.[http://www.infoplease.com/spot/marchonwashington.html]

The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; 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; and self-government for the District of Columbia, then governed by congressional committee.

Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protestors in Washington's history. King's I Have a Dream speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. Throughout his career of service, King wrote and spoke frequently, drawing on his long experience as a preacher. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail", written in 1963, is a passionate statement of his crusade for justice. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States.

Further challenges

Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967— exactly one year before his death— King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an Western colony" and calling the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the globe now." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is does'nt upright." [http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html]

You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism.... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. (Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966. Speech in front of his staff.)

It really doesn't matter what happens now.... some began to... talk about the threats that were out -- what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Assassination
King was assassinated the next evening, April 4, 1968, at 6:01pm, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day.

Two months after King's death, escaped convict James Earl Ray had been captured at London's Heathrow Airport while trying to leave the United Kingdom on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder, confessing to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though he recanted this confession three days later) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray, a presumed white supremacist and segregationist, had allegedy killed King because of the latter's extensive civil rights work. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray had taken a guilty plea to avoid a trial conviction and thus the definite possibility of receiving the death penalty although it was highly unlikely that he would have been executed even if he had been sentenced to death, as the US Supreme Court's 1972 decision in the case of Furman v. Georgia invalidated all state death penalty laws then in force.

Ray had fired Foreman as his attorney (from then on derisively calling him "Percy Fourflusher") claiming that a man he met in Montreal, Canada with the alias "Raoul" was involved, as was his brother Johnny, but not himself, further asserting that although he didn't "personally shoot Dr. King," he may have been "part responsible forswearing caring it," hinting at a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting (unsuccessfully) to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had.

Some speculate Ray had been a patsy much in the way alleged John Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had supposedly been. Among the claims used to support this assertion are the fact that the Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-06 caliber rifle Ray (a burglar and thief but not a killer or other violent criminal) had allegedly used to shoot Dr. King had only two of Ray's fingerprints on it while the second-floor bathroom of Ray's rooming house, from where Ray (an average marksman who hadn't fired a rifle since his Army service in the late 1940s) was believed to have fired at King, contained none of Ray's fingerprints at all.

Many suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point out the two separate ballistic tests conducted on the Remington Gamemaster had neither conclusively proved Ray had been the killer nor that it had even been the murder weapon. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the rooming house, not from the rooming house itself, shrubbery which had been suddenly and inexplicably cut away in the days following the assassination. Also, Ray's petty criminal history had been one of colossal and repeated ineptitude, he'd been quickly and easily apprehended each time he committed an offense, behavior in sharp contrast to that of his shortly before and after the shooting; he'd easily managed to secure several different pieces of legitimate identification, using the names and personal data of living men who all coincidentally looked like and were of about the same age and physical build as Ray, he spent large sums of cash and traveled overseas without being apprehended at any border crossing, even though he had been a wanted fugitive. According to Ray, all of this had been accomplished with the aid of the still unidentified "Raoul." Investigative reporter Louis Lomax had also discovered the Missouri Department of Corrections, shortly after Ray's April 1967 prison escape, had sent the incorrect set of fingerprints to the FBI and had failed to notice or correct this error. Lomax had been publishing a series of investigative stories on the King assassination for the North American Newspaper Alliance, stories challenging the official view of the case, and had been reportedly pressured by the FBI to halt his investigation.

According to a former Pemiscot County, Missouri deputy sheriff, Jim Green, who claimed to have been part of an Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)-led conspiracy to kill Dr. King, Ray had been targeted as the patsy for the King assassination shortly before his April 1967 prison escape and had been tracked by the Bureau during his year as a fugitive. After several trips to and from Canada and Mexico during this time, Ray had gone to Memphis after agreeing to participate (allegedly controlled by his mysterious benefactor "Raoul" who reportedly had weeks before while in Birmingham, Alabama ordered Ray to purchase the Remington Gamemaster rifle) in what he was told was a major bank robbery while King was in town--since city police resources would be dedicated toward maintaining security for King and his entourage, the intended bank heist would be much simpler than usual. Green (who, like Ray, had asserted that FBI assistant director Cartha DeLoach headed the assassination plot) had claimed Ray had been ordered to stay in the rooming house and as a diversion for the purported bank heist, to then hold up a small diner near the rooming house at approximately 6:00 p.m. on April 4th. Dr. King was shot a minute later by a sniper hidden in the shrubbery near the rooming house. Meanwhile, according to Green, two men, one of them allegedly a Memphis police detective, were waiting to ambush and kill Ray while Ray was on his way to the planned diner holdup and then plant the Remington rifle in the trunk of Ray's pale yellow (not white) 1966 Ford Mustang, effectively framing a dead man. However, moments before the assassination, Ray had apparently suspected a setup and instead quickly left town in his Mustang, heading for Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta police found Ray's abandoned Mustang six days after King had been shot.

Ray and six other convicts escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee on June 10, 1977 shortly after Ray testified that he did not shoot King to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but were recaptured on June 13 and returned to prison.[http://knoxville.fbi.gov/hist.htm] More years were then added to his sentence for attempting to escape from the penitentiary.

In 1997 Martin Luther King's son Dexter King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a trial. In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King's widow (also a civil rights leader), along with the rest of King's family won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that "governmental agents were parties" to the assassination plot.[http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFPonMLK.pdf] [http://www.thekingcenter.org/tkc/trial.html]

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his death, noted "A fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt a march. [And] in my have organization, you discovered the super key human world health organization was on the government payroll. Then infiltration inside, saboteurs from either while forgoing & a click attacks. ... We might never imagine that James Earl Ray got a motive, a money & a mobility to use screw himself. My government was super required within setting a stage for & We believe a escape route for James Earl Ray." [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/15/1710221&mode=thread&tid=25] King biographer David Garrow disagrees with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. He is supported by King assassination author Gerald Posner. [http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/10325.html]

King and the FBI

King had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), especially its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who had deeply detested the civil rights leader. The FBI began tracking King and the SCLC in 1961. Its investigations were largely superficial until 1962, when it learned that one of King's most trusted advisers was New York City lawyer Stanley Levison. Levison was a man whom the bureau suspected of involvement with the Communist Party, USA, to which another key King lieutenant, Hunter Pitts O'Dell, was also linked by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The Bureau placed wiretaps on Levison and King's home and office phones, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. The Bureau also informed then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then-President John F. Kennedy, both of whom unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison. For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to Communism, stating at one point that "there are as numbers of Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida"—to which Hoover responded by calling King "the virtually all infamous prevaricator in the united states."

The attempt to smear King as a communist was in keeping with the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were happy with their lot, but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside fomenter." Movement leaders countered that voter disenfranchisement, lack of education and employment opportunities, discrimination and vigilante violence were the reasons for the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, and that blacks had the intelligence and motivation to organize on their own. HUAC later was discredited for its coercion of witnesses and the manner in which it sought to implicate individuals with vague and often sweeping accusations and assumptions of guilt by association. The Committee was renamed in 1969 and eventually abolished. Later, the focus of the Bureau's investigations shifted to attempting to "discredit" King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, demonstrates that he also engaged in numerous extramarital sexual affairs. Accounts of such behavior also have been provided by King's associates, including close friend Ralph Abernathy. The Bureau distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The Bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he didn't cease his civil rights work. Finally, the Bureau's investigation shifted away from King's personal life to intelligence and counterintelligence work on the direction of the SCLC and the Black Power movement. On January 31, 1977, in the cases of Bernard S. Lee v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. and Southern Christian Leadership Conference v. Clarence M. Kelley, et al. United States District Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968, be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

Across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the rooming house in which James Earl Ray was staying, was a vacant fire station. The FBI was assigned to observe King during the appearance he was planning to make on the Lorraine Motel second-floor balcony later that day, and utilized the fire station as a makeshift base. Using papered-over windows with peepholes cut into them, the agents watched over the scene until MLK was shot. Immediately following the shooting, all six agents rushed out of the station and were the first people to administer first-aid to Dr. King. Their presence nearby has led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.

Other awards and recognition
Besides winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1965 the American Jewish Committee [http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=403 presented] the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the American Liberties Medallion for his "exceptional advancement of the information of human being liberty." Reverend King said in his [http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=403&pid=930 acceptance remarks], "Freedom is a single tool. Your family use at times it whole or even your family is non loose."

Authorship issues

See main article, Martin Luther King, Jr. - authorship issues.

Beginning in the 1980s, questions have been raised regarding the authorship of King's dissertation, other papers, and his speeches. (Though not widely known during his lifetime, most of his published writings during his civil rights career were ghostwritten, or at least heavily adapted from his speeches.) Concerns about his doctoral dissertation at Boston University led to a formal inquiry by university officials, which concluded that approximately a third of it had been plagiarized from a paper written by an earlier graduate student, but it was decided not to revoke his degree, as the paper still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." Such uncredited "textual appropriation," as King scholar Clayborne Carson has labeled it, was apparently a habit of King's begun earlier in his academic career. It is also a feature of many of his speeches, which borrowed heavily from those of other preachers and white radio evangelists. While some political opponents have used these findings to criticize King, most of the scholars in question have sought to put them into broader context; for example, Keith Miller, probably the foremost expert on language-borrowing in King's oratory, has argued that the practice falls within the tradition of African-American folk preaching, and should not necessarily be labeled plagiarism.

Legacy
Since his death, King's reputation has grown to become one of the most revered names in American history. Today he is often compared with Abraham Lincoln, with supporters remarking that both men were leaders who strongly advanced human rights against poor odds, in a nation divided against itself on the issue - and were ultimately assassinated in part for it. Even posthumous accusations of marital infidelity and academic plagiarism have not seriously dented his public esteem, but merely reinforced the image of a very human hero and leader. A [http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/greatestamerican/greatestamerican.html Greatest Americans] Poll on the Discovery Channel network had King earning the third spot as the greatest American of all time. In 1980, King's boyhood home in Atlanta and several other nearby buildings were declared as the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. In 1986, a U.S. national holiday was established in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., which is called Martin Luther King Day. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King's birthday. On January 18, 1993, for the first time, Martin Luther King Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states. In addition, many U.S. cities have officially renamed one of their streets to honor King. Since his death, Coretta Scott King has followed her husband's footsteps and is active in matters of social justice and civil rights. The same year Martin Luther King was assassinated, Mrs. King established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide. Dexter King currently serves as the Center's president and CEO. Yolanda King is a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.

King was a prominent member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans. In 1998, the fraternity was authorized by United States Congress to establish a foundation to manage fundraising and design of a memorial to Dr. King [http://www.alphaphialpha.net/].