Martin Luther King Biography Essay, Research Paper
On January 15,1929 Michael Luther King Jr., which was later changed to Martin,
was born. His father Michael Luther King was a Baptist minister and his mother
was a school teacher named Alberta King. In 1948 King graduated from
Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. with a Bachelor of Arts. After King?s
successful campaign to achieve the desegregation of public facilities in
Birmington, Alabama in 1965, he concentrated most of his time and efforts on the
voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama in March
1963.
King inspired and planned the poor peoples campaign, a march on
Washington DC, in 1968 to show the relationship of poverty to urban violence.
But he did not live to take part in it. Early in 1968 he traveled to Memphis,
Tennessee to support a strike of Poorly 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 by blacks in many cities.
He was buried in Atlanta under a monument inscribed with the final words of his
famous ? I have a Dream address?. Which was taken from an old slave
song, the inscription read: ?Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty,I?m
Free at Last.?
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 down there at the other end of this mall in words that moved the
conscience of a nation. Like a prophet of old he told of his dream that one day
America would rise up and treat all its citizens as equals before the law and in
the heart. Martin Luther King’s dream was the American 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 our president made is an
example of the type of impact that King had on the civil rights movement in the
United States, the affect that this man had was that he helped changed
the way of life for the minority.
His bravery and determination prevailed and he made his dream of every
one having rights come true. If King didn’t do the things that he did life aswe
know it probably would be a lot different from the way that it presently is. King
also showed us that there was another way besides the traditional violence to get
things changed, I think that it?s a shame that a man of such greatness had to die
at such a young age, today we could only imagine the other things that he may
have accomplished if he had not been killed.