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Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

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He persuaded Nyota Uhura to continue filming Star Trek in hopes that it would create a greater racial harmony on television.

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He is the only non-president to have a national holiday in his name

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We all know that Martin Luther King Jr. was a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. Most of us know about his work as a pastor and his roles with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). We know he had a dream, and worked tirelessly to make that dream a reality before being assassinated in 1968. But along with the wealth of details that we do know, there are just as many intriguing details that may have sneaked by. So on the 48th anniversary of his assassination, let's honor him with some lesser-known fascinating facts.

1. He was born Michael King Jr. after his father, Michael King Sr., but the senior King changed their names to Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. when Martin Jr. was about 5 years old. By some accounts, King Sr. said that his real name was Martin Luther, but that his mother called him Michael and he didn't know; when he found out, he changed both the names.

2. The younger King was one out of only 11 African-American students in 1948 at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania; in his third year there, he was elected class president. He graduated with honors as class valedictorian.

3. In 1963, he became was the first African-American to be named Time magazine's Man of the Year.

4. At the age of 35, he became the youngest man to have been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated the prize money of $54,123 to benefit the civil rights movement.

5. Between 1957 and 1968, he traveled more than 6 million miles and spoke at more than 2,500 events.

6. He was arrested 30 times and was awarded at least 50 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

7. There are more than 900 streets named after him in the United States - and the number continues to grow.

8. In 1968, the first legislation was introduced by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan to make King's birthday a federal holiday. The bill was finally turned into law in November 1983 and the first official holiday was observed on the third Monday of January in 1986.

9. King is the only non-president to have a national holiday in his name, and is the only non-president with a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

10. In 1994, Congress designated Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a national day of service, which is led by Corporation for National and Community Service. It is the only federal holiday observed as a national day of service - a "day on, not a day off." (To find a local project for which to volunteer, visit the MLKday.gov website or try one of these ideas.)

Bonus: The famous "I have a dream" section of the monumental "I Have a Dream" speech was unscripted; although he had used the phrase before and wanted to include it, an advisor suggested that he leave it out of the speech for this occasion. Fortunately, he went with it. Watch him deliver the historic speech in the video below:

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10 surprising things you may not know about Martin Luther King Jr.

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We all know that Martin Luther King Jr. was a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. Most of us know about his work as a pastor and his roles with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

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He improvised "I have a Dream"

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MLK got a C in public speaking at seminary school

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Constitution Daily looks back at the inspirational story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and uncovers some interesting facts about the late civil rights leader's life.

Dr. King was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, and died in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King's legacy extends into today and he remains one of the most discussed leaders of our time.

Among that discussion are some interesting facts that lend some insight into the man.

Fact 1: Dr. King got a C in public speaking at seminary school. Dr. King's father, a preacher in Atlanta, thought his son was the best speaker he'd ever seen, before he went away to seminary school. But in his first year of seminary school in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of Dr. King's professors gave him a C in a public speaking course! In his third and final year, Dr. King was valedictorian with straight A's.

Fact 2: While at Crozer Theological Seminary, Dr. King was introduced to the teachings and philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi. Dr. King entered Crozer in the fall of 1948, after Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 in India. In an interview, Dr. King said he attended a lecture from the president of Howard University given in Philadelphia about Gandhi, and he immediately became "deeply influenced" by the philosophy of nonviolence.

Fact 3: Dr. King was virtually unknown when he was named as spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. He had recently arrived in Alabama, and the leaders of the boycott, which was sparked by Rosa Parks' decision to keep her bus seat, wanted a newcomer to be the public voice of the movement. There were concerns that some rivalries within the movement could present problems, and Dr. King was picked as a bipartisan leader.

Fact 4. Dr. King apparently improvised parts of the "I Have A Dream" speech in August 1963, including its title passage. Clarence B. Jones worked on the draft of the speech, which was being revised up to the time Dr. King took the podium. He says Dr. King's remarks were up in the air about 12 hours before he spoke, and the "dream" reference wasn't in the speech. Dr. King later added it live when singer Mahalia Jackson prompted him to speak about the "dream." In June 1963, Dr. King had talked about his dream in a speech in Detroit.

Fact 5. When Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, at the time he was the youngest Peace Prize winner ever, at the age of 35. Currently, Tawakkol Karman of Yemen in the youngest winner on record; she was 32 when she won the prize in 2011. His acceptance speech in Norway included the famous statement, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

Other Stories About Dr. King

King's indignant message in "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

10 famous quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Five interesting facts about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Constitution Hall Pass: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.a

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Five interesting facts about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Constitution Daily looks back at the inspirational story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and uncovers some interesting facts about the late civil rights leader's life. Dr. King was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, and died in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

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9)  His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor… not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

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9)  His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor… not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

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http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/01/martin-luther-king-jr-facts/

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There are over 900 streets worldwide names after him

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11 Interesting And Little-Known Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.

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Although Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 at the time of his death, autopsy results revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old. Doctors belie

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He was so smart that he skipped two grades in high school and started his college education at Morehouse College at the young age of fifteen

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MLK has a life sized statue in Westminster Abbey (he is one of 20 martyrs of the 20th century)

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11 Interesting And Little-Known Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.

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Although Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 at the time of his death, autopsy results revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old. Doctors belie

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Martin Luther King Plagiarized his doctoral Thesis

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Article details 'four things you didn't know' about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mostly False

Every January, as the federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, a years-old item that refers to the famous civil rights leader as "a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate" is circulated anew:

Four things you didn't know about Martin Luther King

1. His name wasn't Martin Luther. It was Michael. It was decided Martin Luther had a more prominent ring to it, so he went by that. He never legally changed his name. To this day, he lived and died as Michael King.

2. While working on his dissertation for his doctoral degree at Boston University, he heavily plagiarized from another author who had done research on a subject similar to King's. As academic committee later found that over half of King's work was plagiarized, yet would not revoke his doctrine. King was dead by this time, and the committee ruled that revoking the title would serve no purpose. It was also discovered that King's famous I HAVE A DREAM speech was also not his own. He stole it from a sermon by Archibald Carey, a popular black preacher in the 1950's.

3. King was under FBI surveillance for several years (until he died) due to his ties with communist organizations throughout the country. King accepted money from the organizations to fund his movements. In return, King had to appoint communist leaders to run certain districts of his SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), who then could project their communist ideas to larger audiences. A federal judge in the 60's ruled that the FBI files on King links to communism to remain top-secret until 2027. Senator Jesse Helms appealed to the Supreme Court in 1983 to release the files, so the correct bill in the Senate to create the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday could be abolished. He was denied.

4. One of King's closest friends, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, wrote a book in 1989 in which he talked about King's obsession with white prostitutes. King would often use church donations to have drunken sex parties, where he would hire two to three white prostitutes, occasionally beating them brutally. This has also been reported by the FBI agents who monitored King. King was married with four children.

Martin Luther King Day. A day when this country will come to a screeching halt so we can have parades and memorials to honor this man, a man that most of the world views as a saint for his role in the civil rights movement. No other public holiday in the United States honors a single individual. Of all the great leaders in our Nation's history-none of them have their own holiday. All of our great war heroes share Memorial Day. All of our great presidents share President's Day. Yet king - a man who was a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate gets a day of his own.

Unfortunately, most of this information is false and thereby misleadingly denigrates the memory of a man whom the U.S. has chosen to honor.

1) To this day, questions remain over the names of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father: what names they were given by their parents, what names appeared on their birth records, and when (if ever) they changed their names are subjects of some murkiness. According to an account Martin Luther King, Sr. gave to a New York Post reporter in 1957, he had always intended his son's name to be Martin Luther, and the appearance of the name 'Michael' in his son's birth records was a mistake due to confusion over his own name:

I had been known as Michael Luther King or "Mike" up until I was 22 ... when one day my father, James Albert King, told me: 'You aren't named Mike or Michael either. Your name is Martin Luther King. Your mother just called you Mike for short.' I was elated to know that I had really been named for the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, but there was no way of knowing if papa had made a mistake after all. Neither of my parents could read or write and they kept no record of Negro births in our backwoods county ... I gladly accepted Martin Luther King as my real name and when [my son] M.L. was born, I proudly named him Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was not until 1934, when I was seeking my first passport ... that I found out that Dr. Johnson, who delivered M.L., had listed him in the city records as Michael Luther King, Jr., because he thought that was my real name.

No records documenting a formal name change for either King yet have been uncovered, so in a strict legal sense one might say that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name officially remained "Michael" until his death. However, what constitutes a "legal name" can be quite fluid. My own mother, born in the same era as Martin Luther King, Jr., was raised by people other than her birth parents from an early age and did not know her real first and middle names. (Indeed, she did not learn which names were actually listed on her birth record until I obtained a copy of the document for her when she was in her mid-50s.) Nonetheless, the first and middle names she adopted in place of the unknown real ones were listed on every government-issued record pertaining to her created during her adult lifetime (e.g., marriage license, driver's license, Social Security card, children's birth certificates) and were therefore her "legal" names every bit as much, if not moreso, than the ones that appeared on her birth record.

In any case, whether Martin Luther King, Sr. gave a true account of the issue in 1957 (i.e., that both he and his son were officially named 'Martin' by their fathers but called 'Michael' through confusion or mistake) or simply decided in his adulthood that he preferred he and his son be known as 'Martin' instead of 'Michael,' the name change was not, as suggested above, an affectation on the part of Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was something decided for him by his father while he was still very young.

2) This is the one claim presented here that has some element of truth to it. During the 1980s, archivists associated with The Martin Luther King Papers Project uncovered evidence that the dissertation King prepared for his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University, "A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman," was plagiarized, and the story broke in the national media in 1990. King included in his dissertation a good deal of material taken verbatim from a variety of other sources without proper attribution (or any attribution at all), an act which constitutes plagiarism by ordinary academic standards.

The Martin Luther King Papers Project addressed the issue in Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (and reproduced a statement therefrom in the FAQ on their web site):

The readers of King's dissertation, L. Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling, a professor of systematic theology who had recently arrived at Boston University, failed to notice King's problematic use of sources. After reading a draft of the dissertation, DeWolf criticized him for failing to make explicit "presuppositions and norms employed in the critical evaluation," but his comments were largely positive. He commended King for his handling of a "difficult" topic "with broad learning, impressive ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved." Schilling found two problems with King's citation practices while reading the draft, but dismissed these as anomalous and praised the dissertation in his Second Reader's report ...

As was true of King's other academic papers, the plagiaries in his dissertation escaped detection in his lifetime. His professors at Boston, like those at Crozer, saw King as an earnest and even gifted student who presented consistent, though evolving, theological identity in his essays, exams and classroom comments ... Although the extent of King's plagiaries suggest he knew that he was at least skirting academic norms, the extant documents offer no direct evidence in this matter. Thus he may have simply become convinced, on the basis of his grades at Crozer and Boston, that his papers were sufficiently competent to withstand critical scrutiny. Moreover, King's actions during his early adulthood indicate that he increasingly saw himself as a preacher appropriating theological scholarship rather than as an academic producing such scholarship ...

In 1991 a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation but did not recommend the revocation of his degree:

A committee of scholars at Boston University concluded that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, completed there in the 1950s.

BU provost Jon Westling accepted the panel's recommendation that a letter be attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages lacked appropriate quotations and citations of sources. The letter was placed in the archives yesterday afternoon, a BU spokesman said.

Westling also accepted the committee's statement that "no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree from Boston University" and the assertion that despite its flaws, the dissertation "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship."

The investigatory committee, comprising three professors in the BU School of Theology and one from American University, was appointed by Westling after researchers at Stanford said they had discovered numerous instances of plagiarism in King's work as a graduate student.

While there was general agreement that King acted improperly, Clayborne Carson, head of the King Papers Project at Stanford where the plagiarism initially was uncovered, noted that King made no effort to conceal what he was doing, providing grounds for a belief that King was not willfully engaged in wrongdoing.

Westling said in a prepared statement yesterday that it was "impractical to reach, on the available evidence, any conclusions about Dr. King's reasons for failing to attribute some, but not all, of his sources. The committee's findings, although important from the point of view of historical accuracy, do not affect Dr. King's greatness, not do they change the fact that Dr. King made an unequalled contribution to the cause of justice and equal rights in this nation."

John H. Cartwright, a member of the committee and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Social Ethics at BU, said the committee had examined King's dissertation independently of the King Papers Project and "we did find serious improprieties."

The chair Cartwright occupies was created by the Boston University trustees after King's assassination. Cartwright was entering BU as a seminary student when King was finishing his doctorate.

"We had many of the same professors, we worked in the same atmosphere during our graduate studies," Cartwright said, and "under no circumstances would the atmosphere under which he did his work condone what Dr. King did. It's incredible. He was not unaware of the correct procedure. This wasn't just done out of ignorance."

The committee found that King "is responsible for knowingly misappropriating the borrowed materials that he failed to cite or to cite adequately." It found a pattern of appropriation of uncited material "that is a straightforward breach of academic norms and that constitutes plagiarism as commonly understood."

The letter to be attached to King's dissertation, Cartwright pointed out, "indicates there are serious improprieties and points readers to sources where they can find chapter and verse."

The committee found no grounds for charges raised last year that King drew his organization and chapter headings from another person's dissertation. The plagiarism, the panel said, was of passages from the works of philosophers whose concepts of God King was comparing in his work. The dissertation is titled "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman."

The committee also found no evidence that the professors reviewing King's dissertation had a double standard for African-American students and examined their work less critically than the work of whites. "Standards were applied with equal strictness to black as well as to white students," the panel concluded. "Black as well as white students failed out of the program."

Even though faculty supervision of King's work "failed to detect the large number of uncited borrowings that breached academic norms," the committee also found, the examining professors were not negligent "according to normal standards of supervision."

3) The claim that Martin Luther King "stole" his famous "I Have a Dream" speech from black pastor Archibald Carey is overblown. Carey's speech, a 1952 address to the Republican National Convention, and King's speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963, are quite different; the only substantive
similarity between them occurs in their perorations: both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn " America " (composed in 1832) and references to several American geographic locations from which the speakers exhort their listeners to "let freedom ring":

We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans:
My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim's pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
That's exactly what we mean - from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia - let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for ... the disinherited of all the earth - may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim's pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire!
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York!
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi!
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

4) J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered Martin Luther King to be a threat to white America (terming him "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation") and spent years trying to dig up and manufacture derogatory information about him in order to publicly discredit him and thereby neutralize his effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The FBI asserted that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organization which King headed was controlled and funded by the Communist party and spent years trying to prove it, making King the target of an extensive surveillance program intended to gather evidence documenting ties between the SCLC and communists. But the Bureau was unable to uncover any credible evidence of active participation or funding between the Communist party and the SCLC, as David Garrow chronicled in his exhaustive study of Martin Luther King and the SCLC:

While King continued his criticism of the [Kennedy] administration, the Kennedys were in private consternation about FBI reports that American Communist party leaders were claiming that old ally Stanley Levison was the number one advisor to Martin Luther King. In fact, the reports said, word in the party had it that Levison was writing many of King's most important speeches. Though the FBI's informants had no dependable information that Levison was still loyal to the party's commands, they did know that he continued to give it modest financial support even after severing direct ties. The FBI suspected that Levison's 1955 departure from party activity might have been a cover, and that Levison's friendship with King might be a secret assignment undertaken at the behest of American Communists and their Soviet sponsors.

The FBI's assertions provoked fear in [Attorney General] Robert Kennedy and his closest assistants. Within several weeks time, two courses of action were decided upon. First, electronic surveillance of Levison would be instituted to monitor both his advice to King and any telephone contacts with Soviet or Communist agents. Second, those in the Kennedy administration who had some personal acquaintance with King all would warn the civil rights leader that he ought to end his relationship with Levison immediately. King would also be warned about Jack O'Dell, the man Levison had brought in manage the SCLC's New York office. O'Dell had been involved with the Communist party throughout the 1950s, and his public record of such associations could be used against King and SCLC.

On several occasions during the spring, Robert Kennedy and his assistants warned King about Levison and O'Dell, without being specific about the allegations. Each time the warnings were voiced to King, he listened quietly, thanked the speaker for his concern, and said that he was not one to question the motives of people in the movement, certainly not one so selfless as Stanley Levison. As King explained, how could he give credence to such vague allegations, coming from who knew where, when Levison had a proven track record of five years of honest counsel? If the administration had anything more specific to offer, King would gladly listen, but until then, he would not doubt one of his closest friends.

The FBI kept up its round-the-clock surveillance of Stanley Levison throughout the spring and summer. The wiretaps detected no contacts with Communist agents ... Though his ties to the party were now in the past, such evidence of his final disengagement did not persuade FBI officials, who continued to suspect that Stanley Levison might be a Soviet agent exerting substantial influence on the civil rights movement through his close friendship with Martin King.

Late in October serious controversy broke when several conservative newspapers ran almost identical front-page stories detailing the Communist party ties of SCLC staff member Jack O'Dell. The FBI-planted stories reported that the thirty-nine-year-old O'Dell not only had a public record of past association with the "CP," but in fact still served as a "concealed member" of the party's national committee. The Bureau hoped that this expos&eacute would so embarrass King that the supposed Communist mole would be purged.

After several days, King issued a statement saying that O'Dell had resigned from the SCLC. While King's statement carefully noted that the SCLC had accepted the resignation, "pending further inquiry and clarification," those in the know, including the FBI, were aware that O'Dell remained with SCLC as head of its New York office. The FBI reasoned that King's deceptiveness in retaining O'Dell indicated that the civil rights leader was insensitive to the dangers of Communist subversion, as well as dishonest.

At King's request, O'Dell prepared a private letter explaining his political past. O'Dell stated in the letter that while he had previously supported the Communist party program, "quite awhile before" joining SCLC, he had concluded that his prior belief that "democratic reformation of the South ... required a Communist movement in the South" was incorrect and "mistaken ... I no longer hold such a viewpoint, and neither do I have any Communist affiliation," O'Dell told King. Satisfied with that statement, [attorney Clarence] Jones advised King that O'Dell's supposed "interim resignation" could be set aside, and that O'Dell could remain with SCLC because he "has no present communist affiliation whatsoever."

On the morning of June 30 [1963], the Birmingham News, relying upon information leaked by the FBI, revealed that Jack O'Dell was still on SCLC's payroll and working in its New York office despite King's claim that O'Dell had resigned. [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights] Burke Marshall again pressed King to cut all ties with O'Dell and Levison. Reluctantly, King gave in and acted on the first request. He wrote to O'Dell, in a letter primarily intended for Marshall's consumption, that the "temporary resignation" of the preceding November now was being made permanent. Although SCLC had not discovered "any present connections with the Communist party on your part," the continuing allegation that O'Dell was a secret member of the the CP's national committee was a damaging one, and "in these critical times we cannot afford to risk any such impressions."

Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the SCLC after the latter's assassination in 1968, also disclaimed ties between the SCLC and the Communist party in his autobiography:

We assumed that, though filled with malice toward us, [FBI director J. Edgar Hoover] was a rational man who was merely misinformed about our ultimate aims. If we could disabuse him of his belief that we were Communists or else willing pawns of the international Communist conspiracy, perhaps he would call off his dogs.

The idea that we could reason with such people was naive. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed the best course of action to follow. So, while Martin kept an appointment in Baltimore, Andy Young and I flew to Washington to meet with Hoover's representative, Deke DeLoach, to see if we couldn't explain our aims and achieve some sort of truce.

It was a waste of time and money. DeLoach was not a man who could really speak for Hoover, and we spent most of our time trying to answer charges he was unwilling to admit the FBI had made. We assured him that Martin was not a Communist, that Communists did not control the SCLC and that we had no desire to tear down American society. We pointed out that even in the SCLC's constitution it states very clearly that "No member of this organization shall be a communist nor a communist sympathizer." All we wanted, we said, was equal protection under the law - the right to enjoy the full privileges of American citizenship.

Toward the end of the interview we realized that he was playing an elaborate and patronizing game with us, treating us with a strict courtesy that barely hid his contempt. We left more frustrated than when we had arrived. Not only would the FBI not cease and desist, they would not even talk to us about the matter.

Ralph David Abernathy did acknowledge in his 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, that Martin Luther King engaged in extramarital affairs (evidence of which was sometimes recorded by the FBI through hotel room bugs), but he said absolutely nothing in his book about King's supposed "obsession with white prostitutes," King's using "church donations to have drunken sex parties," or King's hiring "white prostitutes and occasionally beating them brutally." In fact, Abernathy stated quite emphatically that he never knew King to have any sexual involvement with white women at all:

Much has been written in recent years about my friend's weakness for women. Had others not dealt with the matter in such detail, I might have avoided any commentary. Unfortunately, some of these commentators have told only the bare facts without suggesting the reasons why Martin might have indulged in such behavior. They have also left a false impression about the range of his activities.

Martin and I were away more often than we were at home; and while this was no excuse for extramarital relations, it was a reason. Some men are better able to bear such deprivations than others, though all of us in SCLC headquarters had our weak moments. We all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.

In addition to his personal vulnerability, he was also a man who attracted women, even when he didn't intend to, and attracted them in droves. Part of his appeal was his predominant role in the black community and part of it was personal. During the last ten years of his life, Martin Luther King was the most important black man in America. That fact alone endowed him with an aura of power and greatness that women found very appealing. He was a hero - the greatest hero of his age - and women are always attracted to a hero.

But he also had a personal charm that ingratiated him with members of the opposite sex. He was always gracious and courteous to women, whether they were attractive to him or not. He had perfect manners. He was well educated. He was warm and friendly. He could make them laugh. He was good company, something that cannot always be said of heroes. These qualities made him even more attractive in close proximity than he was at a distance.

Then, too, Martin's own love of women was apparent in ways that could not be easily pinpointed - but which women clearly sensed, even from afar. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on a stage and having Martin turn to me to say, "Do you see that woman giving me the eye, the one in the red dress?" I wouldn't be able to pick her out at such a distance, but already she had somehow conveyed to him her attraction and he in turn had responded to it. Later I would see them talking together, as if they had known one another forever. I was always a little bewildered at how strongly and unerringly this mutual attraction operated.

A recent biography has suggested without quite saying so that Martin had affairs with white women as well as black. Such a suggestion is without foundation. I can say with the greatest confidence that he was never attracted to white women and had nothing to do with them, despite the opportunities that may have presented themselves.

Of course, J. Edgar Hoover became preoccupied with Martin's private life early in the civil rights movement, and this preoccupation was a significant factor in Hoover's pathological hatred of him and the movement he headed. Early in the game the FBI began to bug our various hotel rooms, hoping to discover our strategy but also to gather evidence that could be used against Martin personally.

I remember in particular a stay at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where they not only put in audio receivers, but video equipment as well. Then, after collecting enough of this "evidence" to be useful, they began to distribute it to reporters, law officers, and other people in a position to hurt us. Finally, when no one would do Hoover's dirty work for him, someone in the FBI put together a tape of highly intimate moments and sent them to Martin. Unfortunately - and perhaps this was deliberate - [his wife] Coretta received the tape and played it first. But such accusations never seemed to touch her. She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.

A commonly circulated item about Martin Luther King that is not included in this list is the claim that King was a Republican. Such claims are based purely on speculation; King himself never expressed an affiliation with, nor endorsed candidates for, any political party, and his son, Martin Luther King III, said: "It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican."

As for the assertion that "no other public holiday in the United States honors a single individual" besides Martin Luther King Day, we note that Columbus Day (honoring explorer Christopher Columbus) is a federal holiday, as is George Washington 's Birthday.

Farrington, Brendan. "Black Republican Group Uses MLK to Promote Itself."
Associated Press. 4 July 2008.

Radin, Charles A. "Panel Confirms Plagiarism by King at BU."
The Boston Globe. 11 October 1991 (p. 1).

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FACT CHECK: Four Things You Didn't Know About Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Article details 'four things you didn't know' about Martin Luther King, Jr. Mostly False Every January, as the federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, a years-old item that refers to the famous civil rights leader as "a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate" is circulated anew: Four things you didn't know about Martin Luther King 1.

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He has over 900 streets named him in the world

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11 Interesting And Little-Known Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.

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Although Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 at the time of his death, autopsy results revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old. Doctors belie

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One of King's closest friends, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, wrote a book in 1989 in which he talked about King's obsession with white prostitutes

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Article details 'four things you didn't know' about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mostly False

Every January, as the federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, a years-old item that refers to the famous civil rights leader as "a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate" is circulated anew:

Four things you didn't know about Martin Luther King

1. His name wasn't Martin Luther. It was Michael. It was decided Martin Luther had a more prominent ring to it, so he went by that. He never legally changed his name. To this day, he lived and died as Michael King.

2. While working on his dissertation for his doctoral degree at Boston University, he heavily plagiarized from another author who had done research on a subject similar to King's. As academic committee later found that over half of King's work was plagiarized, yet would not revoke his doctrine. King was dead by this time, and the committee ruled that revoking the title would serve no purpose. It was also discovered that King's famous I HAVE A DREAM speech was also not his own. He stole it from a sermon by Archibald Carey, a popular black preacher in the 1950's.

3. King was under FBI surveillance for several years (until he died) due to his ties with communist organizations throughout the country. King accepted money from the organizations to fund his movements. In return, King had to appoint communist leaders to run certain districts of his SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), who then could project their communist ideas to larger audiences. A federal judge in the 60's ruled that the FBI files on King links to communism to remain top-secret until 2027. Senator Jesse Helms appealed to the Supreme Court in 1983 to release the files, so the correct bill in the Senate to create the Martin Luther King Federal Holiday could be abolished. He was denied.

4. One of King's closest friends, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, wrote a book in 1989 in which he talked about King's obsession with white prostitutes. King would often use church donations to have drunken sex parties, where he would hire two to three white prostitutes, occasionally beating them brutally. This has also been reported by the FBI agents who monitored King. King was married with four children.

Martin Luther King Day. A day when this country will come to a screeching halt so we can have parades and memorials to honor this man, a man that most of the world views as a saint for his role in the civil rights movement. No other public holiday in the United States honors a single individual. Of all the great leaders in our Nation's history-none of them have their own holiday. All of our great war heroes share Memorial Day. All of our great presidents share President's Day. Yet king - a man who was a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate gets a day of his own.

Unfortunately, most of this information is false and thereby misleadingly denigrates the memory of a man whom the U.S. has chosen to honor.

1) To this day, questions remain over the names of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father: what names they were given by their parents, what names appeared on their birth records, and when (if ever) they changed their names are subjects of some murkiness. According to an account Martin Luther King, Sr. gave to a New York Post reporter in 1957, he had always intended his son's name to be Martin Luther, and the appearance of the name 'Michael' in his son's birth records was a mistake due to confusion over his own name:

I had been known as Michael Luther King or "Mike" up until I was 22 ... when one day my father, James Albert King, told me: 'You aren't named Mike or Michael either. Your name is Martin Luther King. Your mother just called you Mike for short.' I was elated to know that I had really been named for the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, but there was no way of knowing if papa had made a mistake after all. Neither of my parents could read or write and they kept no record of Negro births in our backwoods county ... I gladly accepted Martin Luther King as my real name and when [my son] M.L. was born, I proudly named him Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was not until 1934, when I was seeking my first passport ... that I found out that Dr. Johnson, who delivered M.L., had listed him in the city records as Michael Luther King, Jr., because he thought that was my real name.

No records documenting a formal name change for either King yet have been uncovered, so in a strict legal sense one might say that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name officially remained "Michael" until his death. However, what constitutes a "legal name" can be quite fluid. My own mother, born in the same era as Martin Luther King, Jr., was raised by people other than her birth parents from an early age and did not know her real first and middle names. (Indeed, she did not learn which names were actually listed on her birth record until I obtained a copy of the document for her when she was in her mid-50s.) Nonetheless, the first and middle names she adopted in place of the unknown real ones were listed on every government-issued record pertaining to her created during her adult lifetime (e.g., marriage license, driver's license, Social Security card, children's birth certificates) and were therefore her "legal" names every bit as much, if not moreso, than the ones that appeared on her birth record.

In any case, whether Martin Luther King, Sr. gave a true account of the issue in 1957 (i.e., that both he and his son were officially named 'Martin' by their fathers but called 'Michael' through confusion or mistake) or simply decided in his adulthood that he preferred he and his son be known as 'Martin' instead of 'Michael,' the name change was not, as suggested above, an affectation on the part of Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was something decided for him by his father while he was still very young.

2) This is the one claim presented here that has some element of truth to it. During the 1980s, archivists associated with The Martin Luther King Papers Project uncovered evidence that the dissertation King prepared for his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University, "A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman," was plagiarized, and the story broke in the national media in 1990. King included in his dissertation a good deal of material taken verbatim from a variety of other sources without proper attribution (or any attribution at all), an act which constitutes plagiarism by ordinary academic standards.

The Martin Luther King Papers Project addressed the issue in Volume II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (and reproduced a statement therefrom in the FAQ on their web site):

The readers of King's dissertation, L. Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling, a professor of systematic theology who had recently arrived at Boston University, failed to notice King's problematic use of sources. After reading a draft of the dissertation, DeWolf criticized him for failing to make explicit "presuppositions and norms employed in the critical evaluation," but his comments were largely positive. He commended King for his handling of a "difficult" topic "with broad learning, impressive ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved." Schilling found two problems with King's citation practices while reading the draft, but dismissed these as anomalous and praised the dissertation in his Second Reader's report ...

As was true of King's other academic papers, the plagiaries in his dissertation escaped detection in his lifetime. His professors at Boston, like those at Crozer, saw King as an earnest and even gifted student who presented consistent, though evolving, theological identity in his essays, exams and classroom comments ... Although the extent of King's plagiaries suggest he knew that he was at least skirting academic norms, the extant documents offer no direct evidence in this matter. Thus he may have simply become convinced, on the basis of his grades at Crozer and Boston, that his papers were sufficiently competent to withstand critical scrutiny. Moreover, King's actions during his early adulthood indicate that he increasingly saw himself as a preacher appropriating theological scholarship rather than as an academic producing such scholarship ...

In 1991 a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation but did not recommend the revocation of his degree:

A committee of scholars at Boston University concluded that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, completed there in the 1950s.

BU provost Jon Westling accepted the panel's recommendation that a letter be attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages lacked appropriate quotations and citations of sources. The letter was placed in the archives yesterday afternoon, a BU spokesman said.

Westling also accepted the committee's statement that "no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree from Boston University" and the assertion that despite its flaws, the dissertation "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship."

The investigatory committee, comprising three professors in the BU School of Theology and one from American University, was appointed by Westling after researchers at Stanford said they had discovered numerous instances of plagiarism in King's work as a graduate student.

While there was general agreement that King acted improperly, Clayborne Carson, head of the King Papers Project at Stanford where the plagiarism initially was uncovered, noted that King made no effort to conceal what he was doing, providing grounds for a belief that King was not willfully engaged in wrongdoing.

Westling said in a prepared statement yesterday that it was "impractical to reach, on the available evidence, any conclusions about Dr. King's reasons for failing to attribute some, but not all, of his sources. The committee's findings, although important from the point of view of historical accuracy, do not affect Dr. King's greatness, not do they change the fact that Dr. King made an unequalled contribution to the cause of justice and equal rights in this nation."

John H. Cartwright, a member of the committee and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Social Ethics at BU, said the committee had examined King's dissertation independently of the King Papers Project and "we did find serious improprieties."

The chair Cartwright occupies was created by the Boston University trustees after King's assassination. Cartwright was entering BU as a seminary student when King was finishing his doctorate.

"We had many of the same professors, we worked in the same atmosphere during our graduate studies," Cartwright said, and "under no circumstances would the atmosphere under which he did his work condone what Dr. King did. It's incredible. He was not unaware of the correct procedure. This wasn't just done out of ignorance."

The committee found that King "is responsible for knowingly misappropriating the borrowed materials that he failed to cite or to cite adequately." It found a pattern of appropriation of uncited material "that is a straightforward breach of academic norms and that constitutes plagiarism as commonly understood."

The letter to be attached to King's dissertation, Cartwright pointed out, "indicates there are serious improprieties and points readers to sources where they can find chapter and verse."

The committee found no grounds for charges raised last year that King drew his organization and chapter headings from another person's dissertation. The plagiarism, the panel said, was of passages from the works of philosophers whose concepts of God King was comparing in his work. The dissertation is titled "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman."

The committee also found no evidence that the professors reviewing King's dissertation had a double standard for African-American students and examined their work less critically than the work of whites. "Standards were applied with equal strictness to black as well as to white students," the panel concluded. "Black as well as white students failed out of the program."

Even though faculty supervision of King's work "failed to detect the large number of uncited borrowings that breached academic norms," the committee also found, the examining professors were not negligent "according to normal standards of supervision."

3) The claim that Martin Luther King "stole" his famous "I Have a Dream" speech from black pastor Archibald Carey is overblown. Carey's speech, a 1952 address to the Republican National Convention, and King's speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963, are quite different; the only substantive
similarity between them occurs in their perorations: both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn " America " (composed in 1832) and references to several American geographic locations from which the speakers exhort their listeners to "let freedom ring":

We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans:
My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim's pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
That's exactly what we mean - from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia - let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for ... the disinherited of all the earth - may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrim's pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire!
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York!
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi!
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

4) J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered Martin Luther King to be a threat to white America (terming him "the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation") and spent years trying to dig up and manufacture derogatory information about him in order to publicly discredit him and thereby neutralize his effectiveness as a civil rights leader. The FBI asserted that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organization which King headed was controlled and funded by the Communist party and spent years trying to prove it, making King the target of an extensive surveillance program intended to gather evidence documenting ties between the SCLC and communists. But the Bureau was unable to uncover any credible evidence of active participation or funding between the Communist party and the SCLC, as David Garrow chronicled in his exhaustive study of Martin Luther King and the SCLC:

While King continued his criticism of the [Kennedy] administration, the Kennedys were in private consternation about FBI reports that American Communist party leaders were claiming that old ally Stanley Levison was the number one advisor to Martin Luther King. In fact, the reports said, word in the party had it that Levison was writing many of King's most important speeches. Though the FBI's informants had no dependable information that Levison was still loyal to the party's commands, they did know that he continued to give it modest financial support even after severing direct ties. The FBI suspected that Levison's 1955 departure from party activity might have been a cover, and that Levison's friendship with King might be a secret assignment undertaken at the behest of American Communists and their Soviet sponsors.

The FBI's assertions provoked fear in [Attorney General] Robert Kennedy and his closest assistants. Within several weeks time, two courses of action were decided upon. First, electronic surveillance of Levison would be instituted to monitor both his advice to King and any telephone contacts with Soviet or Communist agents. Second, those in the Kennedy administration who had some personal acquaintance with King all would warn the civil rights leader that he ought to end his relationship with Levison immediately. King would also be warned about Jack O'Dell, the man Levison had brought in manage the SCLC's New York office. O'Dell had been involved with the Communist party throughout the 1950s, and his public record of such associations could be used against King and SCLC.

On several occasions during the spring, Robert Kennedy and his assistants warned King about Levison and O'Dell, without being specific about the allegations. Each time the warnings were voiced to King, he listened quietly, thanked the speaker for his concern, and said that he was not one to question the motives of people in the movement, certainly not one so selfless as Stanley Levison. As King explained, how could he give credence to such vague allegations, coming from who knew where, when Levison had a proven track record of five years of honest counsel? If the administration had anything more specific to offer, King would gladly listen, but until then, he would not doubt one of his closest friends.

The FBI kept up its round-the-clock surveillance of Stanley Levison throughout the spring and summer. The wiretaps detected no contacts with Communist agents ... Though his ties to the party were now in the past, such evidence of his final disengagement did not persuade FBI officials, who continued to suspect that Stanley Levison might be a Soviet agent exerting substantial influence on the civil rights movement through his close friendship with Martin King.

Late in October serious controversy broke when several conservative newspapers ran almost identical front-page stories detailing the Communist party ties of SCLC staff member Jack O'Dell. The FBI-planted stories reported that the thirty-nine-year-old O'Dell not only had a public record of past association with the "CP," but in fact still served as a "concealed member" of the party's national committee. The Bureau hoped that this expos&eacute would so embarrass King that the supposed Communist mole would be purged.

After several days, King issued a statement saying that O'Dell had resigned from the SCLC. While King's statement carefully noted that the SCLC had accepted the resignation, "pending further inquiry and clarification," those in the know, including the FBI, were aware that O'Dell remained with SCLC as head of its New York office. The FBI reasoned that King's deceptiveness in retaining O'Dell indicated that the civil rights leader was insensitive to the dangers of Communist subversion, as well as dishonest.

At King's request, O'Dell prepared a private letter explaining his political past. O'Dell stated in the letter that while he had previously supported the Communist party program, "quite awhile before" joining SCLC, he had concluded that his prior belief that "democratic reformation of the South ... required a Communist movement in the South" was incorrect and "mistaken ... I no longer hold such a viewpoint, and neither do I have any Communist affiliation," O'Dell told King. Satisfied with that statement, [attorney Clarence] Jones advised King that O'Dell's supposed "interim resignation" could be set aside, and that O'Dell could remain with SCLC because he "has no present communist affiliation whatsoever."

On the morning of June 30 [1963], the Birmingham News, relying upon information leaked by the FBI, revealed that Jack O'Dell was still on SCLC's payroll and working in its New York office despite King's claim that O'Dell had resigned. [Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights] Burke Marshall again pressed King to cut all ties with O'Dell and Levison. Reluctantly, King gave in and acted on the first request. He wrote to O'Dell, in a letter primarily intended for Marshall's consumption, that the "temporary resignation" of the preceding November now was being made permanent. Although SCLC had not discovered "any present connections with the Communist party on your part," the continuing allegation that O'Dell was a secret member of the the CP's national committee was a damaging one, and "in these critical times we cannot afford to risk any such impressions."

Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the SCLC after the latter's assassination in 1968, also disclaimed ties between the SCLC and the Communist party in his autobiography:

We assumed that, though filled with malice toward us, [FBI director J. Edgar Hoover] was a rational man who was merely misinformed about our ultimate aims. If we could disabuse him of his belief that we were Communists or else willing pawns of the international Communist conspiracy, perhaps he would call off his dogs.

The idea that we could reason with such people was naive. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed the best course of action to follow. So, while Martin kept an appointment in Baltimore, Andy Young and I flew to Washington to meet with Hoover's representative, Deke DeLoach, to see if we couldn't explain our aims and achieve some sort of truce.

It was a waste of time and money. DeLoach was not a man who could really speak for Hoover, and we spent most of our time trying to answer charges he was unwilling to admit the FBI had made. We assured him that Martin was not a Communist, that Communists did not control the SCLC and that we had no desire to tear down American society. We pointed out that even in the SCLC's constitution it states very clearly that "No member of this organization shall be a communist nor a communist sympathizer." All we wanted, we said, was equal protection under the law - the right to enjoy the full privileges of American citizenship.

Toward the end of the interview we realized that he was playing an elaborate and patronizing game with us, treating us with a strict courtesy that barely hid his contempt. We left more frustrated than when we had arrived. Not only would the FBI not cease and desist, they would not even talk to us about the matter.

Ralph David Abernathy did acknowledge in his 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, that Martin Luther King engaged in extramarital affairs (evidence of which was sometimes recorded by the FBI through hotel room bugs), but he said absolutely nothing in his book about King's supposed "obsession with white prostitutes," King's using "church donations to have drunken sex parties," or King's hiring "white prostitutes and occasionally beating them brutally." In fact, Abernathy stated quite emphatically that he never knew King to have any sexual involvement with white women at all:

Much has been written in recent years about my friend's weakness for women. Had others not dealt with the matter in such detail, I might have avoided any commentary. Unfortunately, some of these commentators have told only the bare facts without suggesting the reasons why Martin might have indulged in such behavior. They have also left a false impression about the range of his activities.

Martin and I were away more often than we were at home; and while this was no excuse for extramarital relations, it was a reason. Some men are better able to bear such deprivations than others, though all of us in SCLC headquarters had our weak moments. We all understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside of marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.

In addition to his personal vulnerability, he was also a man who attracted women, even when he didn't intend to, and attracted them in droves. Part of his appeal was his predominant role in the black community and part of it was personal. During the last ten years of his life, Martin Luther King was the most important black man in America. That fact alone endowed him with an aura of power and greatness that women found very appealing. He was a hero - the greatest hero of his age - and women are always attracted to a hero.

But he also had a personal charm that ingratiated him with members of the opposite sex. He was always gracious and courteous to women, whether they were attractive to him or not. He had perfect manners. He was well educated. He was warm and friendly. He could make them laugh. He was good company, something that cannot always be said of heroes. These qualities made him even more attractive in close proximity than he was at a distance.

Then, too, Martin's own love of women was apparent in ways that could not be easily pinpointed - but which women clearly sensed, even from afar. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on a stage and having Martin turn to me to say, "Do you see that woman giving me the eye, the one in the red dress?" I wouldn't be able to pick her out at such a distance, but already she had somehow conveyed to him her attraction and he in turn had responded to it. Later I would see them talking together, as if they had known one another forever. I was always a little bewildered at how strongly and unerringly this mutual attraction operated.

A recent biography has suggested without quite saying so that Martin had affairs with white women as well as black. Such a suggestion is without foundation. I can say with the greatest confidence that he was never attracted to white women and had nothing to do with them, despite the opportunities that may have presented themselves.

Of course, J. Edgar Hoover became preoccupied with Martin's private life early in the civil rights movement, and this preoccupation was a significant factor in Hoover's pathological hatred of him and the movement he headed. Early in the game the FBI began to bug our various hotel rooms, hoping to discover our strategy but also to gather evidence that could be used against Martin personally.

I remember in particular a stay at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where they not only put in audio receivers, but video equipment as well. Then, after collecting enough of this "evidence" to be useful, they began to distribute it to reporters, law officers, and other people in a position to hurt us. Finally, when no one would do Hoover's dirty work for him, someone in the FBI put together a tape of highly intimate moments and sent them to Martin. Unfortunately - and perhaps this was deliberate - [his wife] Coretta received the tape and played it first. But such accusations never seemed to touch her. She rose above all the petty attempts to damage their marriage by refusing to even entertain such thoughts.

A commonly circulated item about Martin Luther King that is not included in this list is the claim that King was a Republican. Such claims are based purely on speculation; King himself never expressed an affiliation with, nor endorsed candidates for, any political party, and his son, Martin Luther King III, said: "It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican."

As for the assertion that "no other public holiday in the United States honors a single individual" besides Martin Luther King Day, we note that Columbus Day (honoring explorer Christopher Columbus) is a federal holiday, as is George Washington 's Birthday.

Farrington, Brendan. "Black Republican Group Uses MLK to Promote Itself."
Associated Press. 4 July 2008.

Radin, Charles A. "Panel Confirms Plagiarism by King at BU."
The Boston Globe. 11 October 1991 (p. 1).

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FACT CHECK: Four Things You Didn't Know About Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Article details 'four things you didn't know' about Martin Luther King, Jr. Mostly False Every January, as the federal holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. approaches, a years-old item that refers to the famous civil rights leader as "a phony, a cheater, a traitor, and a sexual degenerate" is circulated anew: Four things you didn't know about Martin Luther King 1.

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Though he died at 39, it was said that he had the heart of a 60 year old

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11 Interesting And Little-Known Facts About Martin Luther King Jr.

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Although Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 at the time of his death, autopsy results revealed that he had the heart of a 60-year-old. Doctors belie

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He won a Grammy for a spoken word album called "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam"

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1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther. Michael King Jr. was two years old at the time and King Sr. made the decision to change his son's name to Martin Luther as well.

2) At the age of 12, he seems to have tried to commit suicide. It was May of 1941 when his grandmother passed away after a heart attack. At the time of this event, King Jr. was off disobeying his parents by going to watch a parade when they told him not to. When he came home and learned his grandmother had died, he went upstairs and jumped from the second story window of his house.

3) King wasn't the only one to die at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. After he was killed, one of the hotel workers, Lorraine Bailey (who was also the wife of the motel owner and who it was named after), upon seeing King get shot, had a heart attack and later died from this. This was partially why there was such a delay in getting an ambulance as Lorraine was also the switchboard operator and so when Reverend Samuel Kyles attempted to call an ambulance using the phone in the motel room, nobody was at the switchboard to make that happen. In Rev. Kyle's own words,

I ran into the room and picked up the phone to call an operator or to call an ambulance. But, the operator had left the switchboard. There was nobody on the switchboard. I was saying, "Answer the phone, answer the phone, answer the phone." And there was nobody on the switchboard. So the phone was not answered. (I learned later that the operator had gone out into the courtyard to watch Dr. King. When she saw what happened, she had a heart attack. She was the motel owner's wife, and she died subsequently.) The police were coming with their guns drawn, and I hollered to the police, "Call an ambulance on your police radio. Dr. King has been shot." They said, "Where did the shot come from?" ... While waiting for the ambulance to come, I took a spread from one of the beds and covered him from his neck down. ... I cannot tell you the feelings I had seeing my friend there on that balcony bleeding to death. Finally the ambulance came and took him away.

4) Also on the day King was killed, he was out on the balcony for a smoke. While you'll be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking, he smoked regularly, though had a habit of hiding this partially due to the stigma, particularly within the church at the time, but also because he didn't want his kids to take up smoking, and so didn't like pictures of himself doing it, nor did he like to smoke when they were around. According to Rev. Kyles, after King was shot but before he was taken away by the ambulance, Kyles removed the package of cigarettes from King's pocket and got rid of the cigarette butt, partially to attempt to hide the fact that King was smoking at the time he was shot.

5) Martin Luther King Jr. was nearly assassinated a decade earlier than his ultimate death. While on a book tour, signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom, on September 20, 1958, King was approached by Izola Ware Curry who asked him if he was Martin Luther King Jr., which he of course replied affirmatively. When he said he was, she said "I've been looking for you for five years." She then pulled out a letter opener and stabbed him in the chest.

It took three full hours to remove the blade. The reason? The sharp point end of the blade was pressing against his aorta and the doctors had to be extremely careful while removing it because of this. The doctor, Dr. Maynard, told him after, "If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting, your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood."

6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944. By 19, he received a bachelor's degree in sociology.

7) He almost didn't become a minister. After graduating from college, he still had serious doubts about Christianity and the Bible and told his father (who was a Baptist minister, as his grandfather had also been) that he didn't want to be a minister and instead was considering becoming a doctor or a lawyer. He later decided that the Bible had "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and chose to become a minister, entering seminary at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He graduated with his PhD at the age of 25.

8) Although King today is often remembered as being an amazing public speaker, he got a C in public speaking during his first year at seminary. This likely isn't because he was actually bad at public speaking at this point. His father noted that even before going to seminary King Jr. was one of the best public speakers he'd seen. Whatever caused his professor to give him a C, by his final year King had straight A's, was the valedictorian of his class, and the student body president.

9) His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor... not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

10) King convinced "Uhura" on Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols (who incidentally later went on to work for NASA), to continue on with the role after the first season. Nichols stated he told her not to leave the show because she was not only playing a black person as a main character on TV, but she was also playing a character that didn't conform to the stereotypical black person of the day, usually portrayed. Rather, Uhura was portrayed as an intelligent member of the crew and an equal to those around her.

This seems to have had the intended effect. Whoopi Goldberg once stated when she first saw the character of Uhura on TV, she said "Momma! There's a black lady on TV, and she ain't no maid!" It was partially because of this that Goldberg became a huge Star Trek fan and later pushed so hard to get a character on Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producers that she'd actually want to be on the show.

Astronaut Ronald McNair, the second black person in space (who also died in the Challenger explosion), was inspired to become an astronaut because of the character of Uhura. McNair's brother stated,

Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together. I just looked at it as science fiction, 'cause that wasn't going to happen, really.' But Ronald saw it as science possibility. He came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys; so how was a colored boy from South Carolina - wearing glasses, never flew a plane - how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was one who didn't accept societal norms as being his norm, you know? That was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise."

11) King is to date the youngest male to win a Nobel Peace Prize, winning it in 1964 at the age of 35 (at the time he was the youngest overall for the Peace Prize). The youngest ever to win the Peace prize today is Malala Yousafzai who won it in 2014 at the age of 17.

12) King donated all of the $54,123 (about $400,000 today) he received for his Nobel Peace Prize to the Civil Rights movement. During his acceptance speech, he stated "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

13) King won a Grammy and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal and a Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom and the Gold Medal make sense, but how on Earth did he win a Grammy, you say? He won it in 1971 for Best Spoken Word Album for "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam".

14) His house was once bombed. This was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted a total of 385 days ( more interesting facts on this boycott here)

15) His mother, Alberta Williams King, was also murdered. She was killed while attending church in Atlanta in 1974 by a 23 year old man, Marcus Wayne Chenault, who believed "all Christians are my enemies". He shot and killed her while she was playing organ at the church.

16) King Jr.'s autopsy revealed that stress had taken a major toll on his body. Despite being just 39 at the time of his death, one of the doctors noted that he had "the heart of a 60 year old".

17) It wasn't until the year 2000 that all 50 states officially observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The last states to join up where Arizona in 1992, New Hampshire in 1999, and Utah in 2000. The holiday itself was originally signed into federal law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, with the first MLK holiday on January 20, 1986.

18) His "I Have a Dream" speech painted an even bigger target before on his back, not just with certain people in the general public, but with the FBI. This was a memo circulated throughout the FBI offices after the speech:

In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands heads and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negros. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.

The FBI later discovered King was supposedly having numerous affairs and sent him various anonymous letters stating such things as "You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that" and threatening to blackmail him. In another anonymous letter supposedly from the FBI, they stated,

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Many of the FBI's surveillance records, written and audio records, concerning King are currently held in the National Archives, but are sealed from public access until 2027.

19) There are only two other people in American history that have a national holiday in their honor, George Washington and Christopher Columbus. As such, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only native born United States citizen to have a national holiday in his honor. (*note: While Washington was born in Virginia, obviously the United States did not yet exist. For reference, the first President to be born in the country of the United States was Martin Van Buren. He was also the first President not of Irish or British ancestry- his ancestors were Dutch.)

20) Today over 700 streets in the Unites States are named after Martin Luther King Jr., with one such street in almost every major city. This is not even counting the amazing number of buildings, schools, and the like named after him.

I'll end this post with the following quote from the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violent resistance:

Non-violent resistance is not for cowards. It is not a quiet, passive acceptance of evil. One is passive and non-violent physically, but very active spiritually, always seeking ways to persuade the opponent of advantages to the way of love, cooperation, and peace.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

Share the Knowledge!

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20 Interesting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Facts

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1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther.

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He was arrested 30 time and was awarded at least 50 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

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His Dad was named Michael King

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He was really into Star Trek

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I have a dream. These timeless words echoed from the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. and pierced the heart of a nation. Now, every third monday of the year hundreds of millions of people across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere celebrate the fact that the world is a better place because he dared to live it. And although most people are familiar with those four famous words, we would venture to say that there are at least a few things about King's life you may not be aware of. So, as we honor one of the greatest civil rights leaders of our time, here are 25 things you didn't know about Martin Luther King Jr.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
25 Things You Didn't Know About Martin Luther King Jr.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I have a dream. These timeless words echoed from the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. and pierced the heart of a nation. Now, every third monday of the year hundreds of millions of people across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere celebrate the fact that the world is a better place because he dared to live it.

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He graduated high school when he was 15.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Selected bibliography
Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present, pp. 106-107. Chicago, Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.

I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures. New York, Time Life Books, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man. Philadelphia. The Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love. New York, Harper & Row, 1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York, Harper, 1958.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper & Row, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can't Wait. New York, Harper & Row, 1963.

"Man of the Year", Time, 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.

"Martin Luther King, Jr.", in Current Biography Yearbook 1965, ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.

Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, Harper, 1959.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Note from Nobelprize.org: This biography uses the word "Negro". Even though this word today is considered inappropriate, the biography is published in its original version in view of keeping it as a historical document.

To cite this section
MLA style: Martin Luther King Jr. - Biography. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sat. 23 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/>

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The Nobel Peace Prize 1964 was awarded to Martin Luther King Jr. "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population"

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He was stabbed by a mentally ill woman

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I have a dream. These timeless words echoed from the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. and pierced the heart of a nation. Now, every third monday of the year hundreds of millions of people across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere celebrate the fact that the world is a better place because he dared to live it. And although most people are familiar with those four famous words, we would venture to say that there are at least a few things about King's life you may not be aware of. So, as we honor one of the greatest civil rights leaders of our time, here are 25 things you didn't know about Martin Luther King Jr.

Lists Going Viral Right Now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
25 Things You Didn't Know About Martin Luther King Jr.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I have a dream. These timeless words echoed from the mouth of Martin Luther King Jr. and pierced the heart of a nation. Now, every third monday of the year hundreds of millions of people across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere celebrate the fact that the world is a better place because he dared to live it.

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6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944.  By 19, he received a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

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6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944.  By 19, he received a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

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http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/01/martin-luther-king-jr-facts/

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He spent his honeymoon in a funeral parlor because his friend owned it and offered to let him use it

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1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther. Michael King Jr. was two years old at the time and King Sr. made the decision to change his son's name to Martin Luther as well.

2) At the age of 12, he seems to have tried to commit suicide. It was May of 1941 when his grandmother passed away after a heart attack. At the time of this event, King Jr. was off disobeying his parents by going to watch a parade when they told him not to. When he came home and learned his grandmother had died, he went upstairs and jumped from the second story window of his house.

3) King wasn't the only one to die at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. After he was killed, one of the hotel workers, Lorraine Bailey (who was also the wife of the motel owner and who it was named after), upon seeing King get shot, had a heart attack and later died from this. This was partially why there was such a delay in getting an ambulance as Lorraine was also the switchboard operator and so when Reverend Samuel Kyles attempted to call an ambulance using the phone in the motel room, nobody was at the switchboard to make that happen. In Rev. Kyle's own words,

I ran into the room and picked up the phone to call an operator or to call an ambulance. But, the operator had left the switchboard. There was nobody on the switchboard. I was saying, "Answer the phone, answer the phone, answer the phone." And there was nobody on the switchboard. So the phone was not answered. (I learned later that the operator had gone out into the courtyard to watch Dr. King. When she saw what happened, she had a heart attack. She was the motel owner's wife, and she died subsequently.) The police were coming with their guns drawn, and I hollered to the police, "Call an ambulance on your police radio. Dr. King has been shot." They said, "Where did the shot come from?" ... While waiting for the ambulance to come, I took a spread from one of the beds and covered him from his neck down. ... I cannot tell you the feelings I had seeing my friend there on that balcony bleeding to death. Finally the ambulance came and took him away.

4) Also on the day King was killed, he was out on the balcony for a smoke. While you'll be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking, he smoked regularly, though had a habit of hiding this partially due to the stigma, particularly within the church at the time, but also because he didn't want his kids to take up smoking, and so didn't like pictures of himself doing it, nor did he like to smoke when they were around. According to Rev. Kyles, after King was shot but before he was taken away by the ambulance, Kyles removed the package of cigarettes from King's pocket and got rid of the cigarette butt, partially to attempt to hide the fact that King was smoking at the time he was shot.

5) Martin Luther King Jr. was nearly assassinated a decade earlier than his ultimate death. While on a book tour, signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom, on September 20, 1958, King was approached by Izola Ware Curry who asked him if he was Martin Luther King Jr., which he of course replied affirmatively. When he said he was, she said "I've been looking for you for five years." She then pulled out a letter opener and stabbed him in the chest.

It took three full hours to remove the blade. The reason? The sharp point end of the blade was pressing against his aorta and the doctors had to be extremely careful while removing it because of this. The doctor, Dr. Maynard, told him after, "If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting, your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood."

6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944. By 19, he received a bachelor's degree in sociology.

7) He almost didn't become a minister. After graduating from college, he still had serious doubts about Christianity and the Bible and told his father (who was a Baptist minister, as his grandfather had also been) that he didn't want to be a minister and instead was considering becoming a doctor or a lawyer. He later decided that the Bible had "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and chose to become a minister, entering seminary at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He graduated with his PhD at the age of 25.

8) Although King today is often remembered as being an amazing public speaker, he got a C in public speaking during his first year at seminary. This likely isn't because he was actually bad at public speaking at this point. His father noted that even before going to seminary King Jr. was one of the best public speakers he'd seen. Whatever caused his professor to give him a C, by his final year King had straight A's, was the valedictorian of his class, and the student body president.

9) His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor... not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

10) King convinced "Uhura" on Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols (who incidentally later went on to work for NASA), to continue on with the role after the first season. Nichols stated he told her not to leave the show because she was not only playing a black person as a main character on TV, but she was also playing a character that didn't conform to the stereotypical black person of the day, usually portrayed. Rather, Uhura was portrayed as an intelligent member of the crew and an equal to those around her.

This seems to have had the intended effect. Whoopi Goldberg once stated when she first saw the character of Uhura on TV, she said "Momma! There's a black lady on TV, and she ain't no maid!" It was partially because of this that Goldberg became a huge Star Trek fan and later pushed so hard to get a character on Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producers that she'd actually want to be on the show.

Astronaut Ronald McNair, the second black person in space (who also died in the Challenger explosion), was inspired to become an astronaut because of the character of Uhura. McNair's brother stated,

Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together. I just looked at it as science fiction, 'cause that wasn't going to happen, really.' But Ronald saw it as science possibility. He came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys; so how was a colored boy from South Carolina - wearing glasses, never flew a plane - how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was one who didn't accept societal norms as being his norm, you know? That was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise."

11) King is to date the youngest male to win a Nobel Peace Prize, winning it in 1964 at the age of 35 (at the time he was the youngest overall for the Peace Prize). The youngest ever to win the Peace prize today is Malala Yousafzai who won it in 2014 at the age of 17.

12) King donated all of the $54,123 (about $400,000 today) he received for his Nobel Peace Prize to the Civil Rights movement. During his acceptance speech, he stated "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

13) King won a Grammy and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal and a Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom and the Gold Medal make sense, but how on Earth did he win a Grammy, you say? He won it in 1971 for Best Spoken Word Album for "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam".

14) His house was once bombed. This was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted a total of 385 days ( more interesting facts on this boycott here)

15) His mother, Alberta Williams King, was also murdered. She was killed while attending church in Atlanta in 1974 by a 23 year old man, Marcus Wayne Chenault, who believed "all Christians are my enemies". He shot and killed her while she was playing organ at the church.

16) King Jr.'s autopsy revealed that stress had taken a major toll on his body. Despite being just 39 at the time of his death, one of the doctors noted that he had "the heart of a 60 year old".

17) It wasn't until the year 2000 that all 50 states officially observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The last states to join up where Arizona in 1992, New Hampshire in 1999, and Utah in 2000. The holiday itself was originally signed into federal law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, with the first MLK holiday on January 20, 1986.

18) His "I Have a Dream" speech painted an even bigger target before on his back, not just with certain people in the general public, but with the FBI. This was a memo circulated throughout the FBI offices after the speech:

In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands heads and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negros. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.

The FBI later discovered King was supposedly having numerous affairs and sent him various anonymous letters stating such things as "You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that" and threatening to blackmail him. In another anonymous letter supposedly from the FBI, they stated,

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Many of the FBI's surveillance records, written and audio records, concerning King are currently held in the National Archives, but are sealed from public access until 2027.

19) There are only two other people in American history that have a national holiday in their honor, George Washington and Christopher Columbus. As such, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only native born United States citizen to have a national holiday in his honor. (*note: While Washington was born in Virginia, obviously the United States did not yet exist. For reference, the first President to be born in the country of the United States was Martin Van Buren. He was also the first President not of Irish or British ancestry- his ancestors were Dutch.)

20) Today over 700 streets in the Unites States are named after Martin Luther King Jr., with one such street in almost every major city. This is not even counting the amazing number of buildings, schools, and the like named after him.

I'll end this post with the following quote from the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violent resistance:

Non-violent resistance is not for cowards. It is not a quiet, passive acceptance of evil. One is passive and non-violent physically, but very active spiritually, always seeking ways to persuade the opponent of advantages to the way of love, cooperation, and peace.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

Share the Knowledge!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
20 Interesting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther.

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His mother was murdered

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther. Michael King Jr. was two years old at the time and King Sr. made the decision to change his son's name to Martin Luther as well.

2) At the age of 12, he seems to have tried to commit suicide. It was May of 1941 when his grandmother passed away after a heart attack. At the time of this event, King Jr. was off disobeying his parents by going to watch a parade when they told him not to. When he came home and learned his grandmother had died, he went upstairs and jumped from the second story window of his house.

3) King wasn't the only one to die at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. After he was killed, one of the hotel workers, Lorraine Bailey (who was also the wife of the motel owner and who it was named after), upon seeing King get shot, had a heart attack and later died from this. This was partially why there was such a delay in getting an ambulance as Lorraine was also the switchboard operator and so when Reverend Samuel Kyles attempted to call an ambulance using the phone in the motel room, nobody was at the switchboard to make that happen. In Rev. Kyle's own words,

I ran into the room and picked up the phone to call an operator or to call an ambulance. But, the operator had left the switchboard. There was nobody on the switchboard. I was saying, "Answer the phone, answer the phone, answer the phone." And there was nobody on the switchboard. So the phone was not answered. (I learned later that the operator had gone out into the courtyard to watch Dr. King. When she saw what happened, she had a heart attack. She was the motel owner's wife, and she died subsequently.) The police were coming with their guns drawn, and I hollered to the police, "Call an ambulance on your police radio. Dr. King has been shot." They said, "Where did the shot come from?" ... While waiting for the ambulance to come, I took a spread from one of the beds and covered him from his neck down. ... I cannot tell you the feelings I had seeing my friend there on that balcony bleeding to death. Finally the ambulance came and took him away.

4) Also on the day King was killed, he was out on the balcony for a smoke. While you'll be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking, he smoked regularly, though had a habit of hiding this partially due to the stigma, particularly within the church at the time, but also because he didn't want his kids to take up smoking, and so didn't like pictures of himself doing it, nor did he like to smoke when they were around. According to Rev. Kyles, after King was shot but before he was taken away by the ambulance, Kyles removed the package of cigarettes from King's pocket and got rid of the cigarette butt, partially to attempt to hide the fact that King was smoking at the time he was shot.

5) Martin Luther King Jr. was nearly assassinated a decade earlier than his ultimate death. While on a book tour, signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom, on September 20, 1958, King was approached by Izola Ware Curry who asked him if he was Martin Luther King Jr., which he of course replied affirmatively. When he said he was, she said "I've been looking for you for five years." She then pulled out a letter opener and stabbed him in the chest.

It took three full hours to remove the blade. The reason? The sharp point end of the blade was pressing against his aorta and the doctors had to be extremely careful while removing it because of this. The doctor, Dr. Maynard, told him after, "If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting, your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood."

6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944. By 19, he received a bachelor's degree in sociology.

7) He almost didn't become a minister. After graduating from college, he still had serious doubts about Christianity and the Bible and told his father (who was a Baptist minister, as his grandfather had also been) that he didn't want to be a minister and instead was considering becoming a doctor or a lawyer. He later decided that the Bible had "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and chose to become a minister, entering seminary at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He graduated with his PhD at the age of 25.

8) Although King today is often remembered as being an amazing public speaker, he got a C in public speaking during his first year at seminary. This likely isn't because he was actually bad at public speaking at this point. His father noted that even before going to seminary King Jr. was one of the best public speakers he'd seen. Whatever caused his professor to give him a C, by his final year King had straight A's, was the valedictorian of his class, and the student body president.

9) His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor... not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

10) King convinced "Uhura" on Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols (who incidentally later went on to work for NASA), to continue on with the role after the first season. Nichols stated he told her not to leave the show because she was not only playing a black person as a main character on TV, but she was also playing a character that didn't conform to the stereotypical black person of the day, usually portrayed. Rather, Uhura was portrayed as an intelligent member of the crew and an equal to those around her.

This seems to have had the intended effect. Whoopi Goldberg once stated when she first saw the character of Uhura on TV, she said "Momma! There's a black lady on TV, and she ain't no maid!" It was partially because of this that Goldberg became a huge Star Trek fan and later pushed so hard to get a character on Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producers that she'd actually want to be on the show.

Astronaut Ronald McNair, the second black person in space (who also died in the Challenger explosion), was inspired to become an astronaut because of the character of Uhura. McNair's brother stated,

Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together. I just looked at it as science fiction, 'cause that wasn't going to happen, really.' But Ronald saw it as science possibility. He came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys; so how was a colored boy from South Carolina - wearing glasses, never flew a plane - how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was one who didn't accept societal norms as being his norm, you know? That was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise."

11) King is to date the youngest male to win a Nobel Peace Prize, winning it in 1964 at the age of 35 (at the time he was the youngest overall for the Peace Prize). The youngest ever to win the Peace prize today is Malala Yousafzai who won it in 2014 at the age of 17.

12) King donated all of the $54,123 (about $400,000 today) he received for his Nobel Peace Prize to the Civil Rights movement. During his acceptance speech, he stated "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

13) King won a Grammy and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal and a Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom and the Gold Medal make sense, but how on Earth did he win a Grammy, you say? He won it in 1971 for Best Spoken Word Album for "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam".

14) His house was once bombed. This was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted a total of 385 days ( more interesting facts on this boycott here)

15) His mother, Alberta Williams King, was also murdered. She was killed while attending church in Atlanta in 1974 by a 23 year old man, Marcus Wayne Chenault, who believed "all Christians are my enemies". He shot and killed her while she was playing organ at the church.

16) King Jr.'s autopsy revealed that stress had taken a major toll on his body. Despite being just 39 at the time of his death, one of the doctors noted that he had "the heart of a 60 year old".

17) It wasn't until the year 2000 that all 50 states officially observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The last states to join up where Arizona in 1992, New Hampshire in 1999, and Utah in 2000. The holiday itself was originally signed into federal law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, with the first MLK holiday on January 20, 1986.

18) His "I Have a Dream" speech painted an even bigger target before on his back, not just with certain people in the general public, but with the FBI. This was a memo circulated throughout the FBI offices after the speech:

In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands heads and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negros. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.

The FBI later discovered King was supposedly having numerous affairs and sent him various anonymous letters stating such things as "You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that" and threatening to blackmail him. In another anonymous letter supposedly from the FBI, they stated,

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Many of the FBI's surveillance records, written and audio records, concerning King are currently held in the National Archives, but are sealed from public access until 2027.

19) There are only two other people in American history that have a national holiday in their honor, George Washington and Christopher Columbus. As such, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only native born United States citizen to have a national holiday in his honor. (*note: While Washington was born in Virginia, obviously the United States did not yet exist. For reference, the first President to be born in the country of the United States was Martin Van Buren. He was also the first President not of Irish or British ancestry- his ancestors were Dutch.)

20) Today over 700 streets in the Unites States are named after Martin Luther King Jr., with one such street in almost every major city. This is not even counting the amazing number of buildings, schools, and the like named after him.

I'll end this post with the following quote from the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violent resistance:

Non-violent resistance is not for cowards. It is not a quiet, passive acceptance of evil. One is passive and non-violent physically, but very active spiritually, always seeking ways to persuade the opponent of advantages to the way of love, cooperation, and peace.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

Share the Knowledge!

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20 Interesting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Facts

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1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther.

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His house was once bombed

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At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize

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facts about MLK

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His birth name is Michael Luther King Jr.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
Selected bibliography
Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present, pp. 106-107. Chicago, Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.

I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures. New York, Time Life Books, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man. Philadelphia. The Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love. New York, Harper & Row, 1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York, Harper, 1958.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. New York, Harper & Row, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can't Wait. New York, Harper & Row, 1963.

"Man of the Year", Time, 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.

"Martin Luther King, Jr.", in Current Biography Yearbook 1965, ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.

Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York, Harper, 1959.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Note from Nobelprize.org: This biography uses the word "Negro". Even though this word today is considered inappropriate, the biography is published in its original version in view of keeping it as a historical document.

To cite this section
MLA style: Martin Luther King Jr. - Biography. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sat. 23 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/>

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The Nobel Peace Prize 1964 was awarded to Martin Luther King Jr. "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population"

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He tried to commit suicide at the age of 12 after hearing of his grandmother's death

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1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther. Michael King Jr. was two years old at the time and King Sr. made the decision to change his son's name to Martin Luther as well.

2) At the age of 12, he seems to have tried to commit suicide. It was May of 1941 when his grandmother passed away after a heart attack. At the time of this event, King Jr. was off disobeying his parents by going to watch a parade when they told him not to. When he came home and learned his grandmother had died, he went upstairs and jumped from the second story window of his house.

3) King wasn't the only one to die at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. After he was killed, one of the hotel workers, Lorraine Bailey (who was also the wife of the motel owner and who it was named after), upon seeing King get shot, had a heart attack and later died from this. This was partially why there was such a delay in getting an ambulance as Lorraine was also the switchboard operator and so when Reverend Samuel Kyles attempted to call an ambulance using the phone in the motel room, nobody was at the switchboard to make that happen. In Rev. Kyle's own words,

I ran into the room and picked up the phone to call an operator or to call an ambulance. But, the operator had left the switchboard. There was nobody on the switchboard. I was saying, "Answer the phone, answer the phone, answer the phone." And there was nobody on the switchboard. So the phone was not answered. (I learned later that the operator had gone out into the courtyard to watch Dr. King. When she saw what happened, she had a heart attack. She was the motel owner's wife, and she died subsequently.) The police were coming with their guns drawn, and I hollered to the police, "Call an ambulance on your police radio. Dr. King has been shot." They said, "Where did the shot come from?" ... While waiting for the ambulance to come, I took a spread from one of the beds and covered him from his neck down. ... I cannot tell you the feelings I had seeing my friend there on that balcony bleeding to death. Finally the ambulance came and took him away.

4) Also on the day King was killed, he was out on the balcony for a smoke. While you'll be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking, he smoked regularly, though had a habit of hiding this partially due to the stigma, particularly within the church at the time, but also because he didn't want his kids to take up smoking, and so didn't like pictures of himself doing it, nor did he like to smoke when they were around. According to Rev. Kyles, after King was shot but before he was taken away by the ambulance, Kyles removed the package of cigarettes from King's pocket and got rid of the cigarette butt, partially to attempt to hide the fact that King was smoking at the time he was shot.

5) Martin Luther King Jr. was nearly assassinated a decade earlier than his ultimate death. While on a book tour, signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom, on September 20, 1958, King was approached by Izola Ware Curry who asked him if he was Martin Luther King Jr., which he of course replied affirmatively. When he said he was, she said "I've been looking for you for five years." She then pulled out a letter opener and stabbed him in the chest.

It took three full hours to remove the blade. The reason? The sharp point end of the blade was pressing against his aorta and the doctors had to be extremely careful while removing it because of this. The doctor, Dr. Maynard, told him after, "If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting, your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood."

6) King Jr. skipped two grades in high school, 9th and 11th, and entered college (Moorehouse College) at the tender age of 15 in 1944. By 19, he received a bachelor's degree in sociology.

7) He almost didn't become a minister. After graduating from college, he still had serious doubts about Christianity and the Bible and told his father (who was a Baptist minister, as his grandfather had also been) that he didn't want to be a minister and instead was considering becoming a doctor or a lawyer. He later decided that the Bible had "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and chose to become a minister, entering seminary at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He graduated with his PhD at the age of 25.

8) Although King today is often remembered as being an amazing public speaker, he got a C in public speaking during his first year at seminary. This likely isn't because he was actually bad at public speaking at this point. His father noted that even before going to seminary King Jr. was one of the best public speakers he'd seen. Whatever caused his professor to give him a C, by his final year King had straight A's, was the valedictorian of his class, and the student body president.

9) His honeymoon was spent at a funeral parlor... not because someone died, simply because a friend owned the parlor and offered to let him use it for his honeymoon.

10) King convinced "Uhura" on Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols (who incidentally later went on to work for NASA), to continue on with the role after the first season. Nichols stated he told her not to leave the show because she was not only playing a black person as a main character on TV, but she was also playing a character that didn't conform to the stereotypical black person of the day, usually portrayed. Rather, Uhura was portrayed as an intelligent member of the crew and an equal to those around her.

This seems to have had the intended effect. Whoopi Goldberg once stated when she first saw the character of Uhura on TV, she said "Momma! There's a black lady on TV, and she ain't no maid!" It was partially because of this that Goldberg became a huge Star Trek fan and later pushed so hard to get a character on Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producers that she'd actually want to be on the show.

Astronaut Ronald McNair, the second black person in space (who also died in the Challenger explosion), was inspired to become an astronaut because of the character of Uhura. McNair's brother stated,

Now, Star Trek showed the future where there were black folk and white folk working together. I just looked at it as science fiction, 'cause that wasn't going to happen, really.' But Ronald saw it as science possibility. He came up during a time when there was Neil Armstrong and all of those guys; so how was a colored boy from South Carolina - wearing glasses, never flew a plane - how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was one who didn't accept societal norms as being his norm, you know? That was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise."

11) King is to date the youngest male to win a Nobel Peace Prize, winning it in 1964 at the age of 35 (at the time he was the youngest overall for the Peace Prize). The youngest ever to win the Peace prize today is Malala Yousafzai who won it in 2014 at the age of 17.

12) King donated all of the $54,123 (about $400,000 today) he received for his Nobel Peace Prize to the Civil Rights movement. During his acceptance speech, he stated "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."

13) King won a Grammy and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal and a Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom and the Gold Medal make sense, but how on Earth did he win a Grammy, you say? He won it in 1971 for Best Spoken Word Album for "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam".

14) His house was once bombed. This was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted a total of 385 days ( more interesting facts on this boycott here)

15) His mother, Alberta Williams King, was also murdered. She was killed while attending church in Atlanta in 1974 by a 23 year old man, Marcus Wayne Chenault, who believed "all Christians are my enemies". He shot and killed her while she was playing organ at the church.

16) King Jr.'s autopsy revealed that stress had taken a major toll on his body. Despite being just 39 at the time of his death, one of the doctors noted that he had "the heart of a 60 year old".

17) It wasn't until the year 2000 that all 50 states officially observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The last states to join up where Arizona in 1992, New Hampshire in 1999, and Utah in 2000. The holiday itself was originally signed into federal law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, with the first MLK holiday on January 20, 1986.

18) His "I Have a Dream" speech painted an even bigger target before on his back, not just with certain people in the general public, but with the FBI. This was a memo circulated throughout the FBI offices after the speech:

In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands heads and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negros. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.

The FBI later discovered King was supposedly having numerous affairs and sent him various anonymous letters stating such things as "You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that" and threatening to blackmail him. In another anonymous letter supposedly from the FBI, they stated,

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Many of the FBI's surveillance records, written and audio records, concerning King are currently held in the National Archives, but are sealed from public access until 2027.

19) There are only two other people in American history that have a national holiday in their honor, George Washington and Christopher Columbus. As such, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only native born United States citizen to have a national holiday in his honor. (*note: While Washington was born in Virginia, obviously the United States did not yet exist. For reference, the first President to be born in the country of the United States was Martin Van Buren. He was also the first President not of Irish or British ancestry- his ancestors were Dutch.)

20) Today over 700 streets in the Unites States are named after Martin Luther King Jr., with one such street in almost every major city. This is not even counting the amazing number of buildings, schools, and the like named after him.

I'll end this post with the following quote from the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violent resistance:

Non-violent resistance is not for cowards. It is not a quiet, passive acceptance of evil. One is passive and non-violent physically, but very active spiritually, always seeking ways to persuade the opponent of advantages to the way of love, cooperation, and peace.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

Share the Knowledge!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
20 Interesting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1) His name was originally Michael, not Martin. His father was also Michael King, hence why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther.

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Skipped two grades in highschool (9th and 11th) -> went to college at the age of 15

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facts about MLK

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facts about MLK

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facts about MLK

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facts about MLK