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Martin Luther King Jr.

· He was an American Baptist minister who became a civil-rights leader from 1955 to 1968.

· He advocated for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights for people of color in the United States of America.

The King Family

· Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael Luther King Jr. but changed his name to Martin.

· He was born on January 15th, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia; and died on April 4th, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

· His father was Martin Luther King Sr. He was an African American Baptist pastor, missionary, and advocate for Civil Rights Movement.

· His mother was Alberta Christine Williams King. She was the director and organizer at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

· MLK Jr.'s older sister was Willie Christine King Farris, and his youngest brother was Alfred Daniel Williams King.

Early Years

· MLK Jr, studied Medicine and Law at Morehead College. He also attended Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University.

· He married Coretta Scott in 1953, in Alabama.

· MLK Jr.'s children were Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice Albertine King.

· MLK Jr. and Coretta Scott moved to Atlanta in 1959, to serve the Ebenezer Baptist Church and expand the Civil Rights Movement.

Civil Rights Movement

· Due to the corrupt and systematic racism he endured and witnessed throughout his life. King decided to become an activist in the civil rights movement and became the leader of the bus boycotting protest that lasted 382 days.

· MLK Jr. was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence resilience. MLK Jr. developed a passion for fighting for his beliefs in nonviolent protests.

· In 1956, King was arrested, abused, his house was bombed, but he still maintained the leader of the movement.

· In 1957, he became the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They focused on peaceful protests.

· MLK Jr. led a massive protest in Birmingham Alabama, which inspired his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

· In 1964, at the age of 35. MLK Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize. Along with $54,123 that he used for the civil rights movement.

MLK Jr. tragic death

· On April 4th, 1968, MLK Jr. was standing on the balcony of a motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was shot dead by James Earl Ray.

MLK Jr. Day

· The 3rd Monday in January, the U.S honors Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is a day to reflect on ways we can all come together to better our community and recognize the sacrifices made to achieve freedom and equality.

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Martin Luther King Jr Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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· In the 1950s, the segregation laws were heavily enforced. Restrooms were separated by skin color, as well as restaurants, transportation, and other shared areas.

· On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to give up her seat on a city bus.

· In 1963, the Birmingham Campaign occurred, and King Jr. was imprisoned during the protest.

· On August 28th, 1963, the black community marched in Washington D.C, where MLK Jr. presented his “I Have a Dream” speech.

· On March 7th, 1965, peaceful protesters were at the Alabama State Capital, while state troopers were beating and harming them. That day became known as Bloody Sunday.

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Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” focuses on the themes of Christianity, justice, and racism. In this letter, he shows his point of view of racial equality as a moral issue. He also brings up the Apostle Paul, a missionary for Christ, to bear a comparison with the nonviolent protestors.
King supported Apostle Paul’s strategy and claims that equally as Paul traveled to spread the gospel, in the same way, the civil rights movement can spread their beliefs of racial equality in a peaceful manner.

Consequently, King’s letter pleads to the patriotic, moral, religious, and legal feelings of his followers. He expresses those racial injustices, which include segregation, must be recognized, and entirely corrected. He references how even the police act unjustly and inhumanly towards black people. Finally, Martin Luther King finishes by acknowledging that he was incarcerated for promulgating his beliefs and what he and activists perceived was true.

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On April 12, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and nearly 50 other protestors and civil rights leaders were arrested after leading a Good Friday demonstration as part of the Birmingham Campaign, designed to bring national attention to the brutal, racist treatment suffered by blacks in one of the most segregated cities in America-Birmingham, Alabama. For months, an organized boycott of the city's white-owned businesses had failed to achieve any substantive results, leaving King and others convinced they had no other options but more direct actions, ignoring a recently passed ordinance that prohibited public gathering without an official permit.

For King, this arrest-his 13th-would become one of the most important of his career. Thrown into solitary confinement, King was initially denied access to his lawyers or allowed to contact his wife, until President John F. Kennedy was urged to intervene on his behalf. As previously agreed upon, King was not immediately bailed out of jail by his supporters, having instead agreed to a longer stay in jail to draw additional attention to the plight of black Americans.

Shortly after King's arrest, a friend smuggled in a copy of an April 12 Birmingham newspaper which included an open letter, written by eight local Christian and Jewish religious leaders, which criticized both the demonstrations and King himself, whom they considered an outside agitator. Isolated in his cell, King began working on a response. Without notes or research materials, King drafted an impassioned defense of his use of nonviolent, but direct, actions.
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Martin Luther King Jr.
Over the course of the letter's 7,000 words, he turned the criticism back upon both the nation's religious leaders and more moderate-minded white Americans, castigating them for sitting passively on the sidelines while King and others risked everything agitating for change. King drew inspiration for his words from a long line of religious and political philosophers, quoting everyone from St. Augustine and Socrates to Thomas Jefferson and then-Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, who had overseen the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

For those, including the Birmingham religious leaders, who urged caution and remained convinced that time would solve the country's racial issues, King reminded them of Warren's own words on the need for desegregation, "justice too long delayed is justice denied." And for those who thought the Atlanta-based King had no right to interfere with issues in Alabama, King argued, in one of his most famous phrases, that he could not sit "idly by in Atlanta" because "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Without writing papers, King initially began by jotting down notes in the margin of the newspaper itself, before writing out portions of the work on scraps of paper he gave his attorneys-allowing a King ally, Wyatt Walker, to begin compiling the letter, which eventually ran to 21 double-spaced, typed pages. Curiously, King never sent a copy to any of the eight Birmingham clergy to whom he had "responded," leaving many to believe that he had intended it to have a much broader, national, audience all along.

King was finally released from jail on April 20, four days after penning the letter. Despite the harsh treatment he and his fellow protestors had received, King continued his work in Birmingham. Just two weeks later, more than 1,000 schoolchildren took part in the famed "Children's Crusade," skipping school to march through the city streets advocating for integration and racial equality. Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor, who King had repeatedly criticized in his letter for his harsh treatment, ordered fire hoses and police dogs to be turned on the young protestors; more than 600 of them were jailed on the first day alone. The brutal and cruel police tactics on display in Alabama were broadcast on televisions around the world, horrifying many Americans.
READ MORE: 8 Works of Literature Written from Prison
With Birmingham in chaos and businesses shuttered, local officials were forced to meet with King and agree to some, but not all, of his demands. On June 11, with the horrific events in Birmingham still seared on the American consciousness, and following Governor George Wallace's refusal to integrate the University of Alabama until the arrival of the U.S. National Guard, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing his plans to present sweeping civil rights legislation to the U.S. Congress. Kennedy's announcement, however, did little to quell the unrest in Birmingham and on September 15, 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church left four young African American girls dead.

By this time, King's Letter from Birmingham Jail had begun to appear in publications across the country. Months earlier, Harvey Shapiro, an editor at The New York Times, had urged King to use his frequent jailing as an opportunity to write a longer defense of his use of nonviolent tactics, and though King did so, The New York Times chose not to publish it. Others did, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Century, one of the most prominent Protestant magazines in the nation. In the weeks leading up to the March on Washington, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference used the letter as part of its fundraising efforts, and King himself used it as a basis for a book, Why We Can't Wait, which looked back upon the successes and failures of the Birmingham Campaign. The book was released in July 1964, the same month President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act into law.

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Behind Martin Luther King's Searing 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' | HISTORY

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King penned of the seminal texts of the civil rights movement while in solitary confinement, initially on the margins of a newspaper.

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Martin Luther King Jr. dared to raise his voice to end injustices. His decision to have nonviolent protests rather than violent riots shows that he followed his Christian value until his last day. MLK Jr. believed that real change could be obtained with patience and perseverance. He traveled thousands of miles to spread his beliefs so that people would work together for a change in their communities. Although he was abused, imprisoned, and harmed, he never stopped fighting for what he believed; the same way Apostle Paul did. Systemic Racism, discrimination, and segregation are unacceptable, and MLK Jr. fought them with the most powerful strategies there are love, hope, and peace. Only those can be a strong motor for people to keep fighting after they endured the horrible things they did. MLK Jr. sacrificed himself so that the newer generations could live with dignity and freedom.