Martin Luther King (MLK)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the head man during watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

In 1960 King and his family moved back to his native city of Atlanta where he became a co-pastor with his dad. During the Birmingham campaign of 1963, marches to protest segregation, sit-ins, and more in one of America's most racially divided cities. Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

In King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “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.'”

He was fatally shot on the night of Aril 4, 1968 while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. To this day he is the only non-president to have a national holiday dedicated in his honor and to be memorialized on the Great Mall in the nations capitol.

Sources:

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/martin-luther-king-fbi-files.html