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Olivia transmite su cariño por medio de actitudes amables y espontáneas hacia sus profesores. 

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Olivia transmite su cariño por medio de actitudes amables y espontáneas hacia sus profesores. 

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Garden of Praise: Malala Yousafzai Biography

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Biographies for children. Biography of Malala Yousafzai for elementry and middle school students. Fun online educational games and worksheets are provided free for each biography.

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La amabilidad empieza con uno mismo :)

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The Anthill: An important story about truth and honesty - Educational Stories for Children

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Los niños de Van Gogh B reflexionan sobre su desempeño durante los primeros meses del año académico, y demuestran ser niños íntegros al asumir nuevos compromisos y responsabilidades para seguir mejorando.

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by Stephanie and Audrey
from Forest Hills

Iqbal Masih was a Pakistani boy, living life in a nightmare. At the age of four, his father sold him to a carpet store for twelve dollars. He was a slave, and worked on looms until the age of ten. He escaped, and was eventually saved by Ehsan Ulla Khan, founder of the Bondage Labor Liberation Front.

Iqbal suffered while working on the loom, and he refused to go back. He was both verbally and physically abused, and not well fed. Every night, he was chained to his carpet loom, on which he worked for over twelve hours a day. Because he had to bend over for so many hours, his back became curved, causing him to stop growing. His lungs were affected as well. Because he inhaled a lot of dust from the factory, he had a hard time breathing. After Iqbal was rescued, he became a member of the Bondage Labor Liberation Front, ot BLLF. His speeches raised a lot of interest within Pakistan as to the labor conditions. Iqbal's began speaking internationally, making him a hero at the age of twelve! He was awarded the Reebok Human Rights Youth Award.

Most people think that children are not mature enough to make a difference, but clearly, Iqbal's actions prove that kids do matter.

Then, on April 16, 1995, Easter Sunday, Iqbal was murdered. News went flying around about the death of Iqbal Masih. The only thing that we can guess is that the Carpet Mafia murdered him, because Iqbals' protests had decreased the profits of the carpet mills. They wanted his impact to end, so they shot him with a rifle. He was just a normal twelve-year-old boy with a dream to help others.

Iqbal's speeches still live on today. Our world is still cruel and filled with hatred, but, because of people like Iqbal, we show that we can change it. Iqbal was truly an amazing person. He is definitely a great hero.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Related Links

Iqbal Masih - Read another MY HERO story about Iqbal.

View a SHORT FILM about Iqbal - The film 'Courage' shows how Iqbal decided to fight to end the plight of his fellow children. Iqbal's courage inspired others around the world

Bibliography

Kuklin, Susan . Iqbal Masih Crusaders Against Child Slavery. Canada1988.

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stephanie and audrey<br> from forest hills

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Iqbal Masih was a Pakistani boy, living life in a nightmare. At the age of four, his father sold him to a carpet store for twelve dollars. He was a slave, and worked on looms until the age of ten. He escaped, and was eventually saved by Ehsan Ulla Khan, founder of the Bondage Labor Liberation Front.

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Una alegre canción para promover la amabilidad.

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Kindness by The Juicebox Jukebox 🎶 Be Kind Kids Song Children's Music World Kindness Day Random Acts

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The Weasel Puffin Unicorn Baboon Pig Lobster Race

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What I am looking for is not "out there", it is in me. - Helen Keller

Everybody is looking for something, but only some find what they are looking for. Some people don't realize that what they are looking for is within them. What happens when you can't look because you can't see? Do you give up because the odds are against you? Louis Braille certainly did not. When he was three, Louis Braille got into an accident in his father's workshop with an awl, a tool with a long, pointed spike, leaving him blind in one eye. His blind eye quickly became infected, which then spread to the other eye causing him to become totally blind. The chances of Louis to become the man as we know him to be today were very slim to none because of his disabilities. However, he overcame his disability, and then, he dedicated his life to discovering a way for blind people to read and to become independent. Thus, Louis solved one of the world's greatest problems, and with that, he made himself a hero.

Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, a small town in France on January 4, 1809. He had a normal life until he was three years old, when he had his tragic and life-changing accident. Since becoming blind, most everybody gave up on him becoming well-educated. Louis started taking matters into his own hands. He spent most of his life working hard on his studies, which all paid off, when he was ten and received a scholarship to the National Institute of Blind Youth. Braille graduated and decided to stay and become a teacher. In 1835, Braille was diagnosed in his twenties with tuberculosis, but still was dedicated to developing his invention, and lived for about 17 years longer. He died two days after his birthday on January 6, 1852; he was only 43 years old when he passed.

One of the most amazing accomplishments of Louis Braille is that he was able to overcome his disability and inspire thousands with his proven independence. When Louis invented the Braille Coding System, he gave the gift of independence and reading to every blind person in the world. Incredibly, Louis published his first book, written in Braille, at the age of 15. Not only was he being independent and keeping up with his peers, he was exceeding both the blind and seeing kids in academics and accomplishments. His invention would eventually help the world, but during this time, he was focused on helping the blind kids at his school. "Now practically every country in world uses Braille. Braille books have double-sided pages, which saves a lot of paper. Braille signs help the blind get around public spaces. And, most important, blind people can communicate independently without needing print." ("Louis Braille".AFB) Only a handful of people can create an invention of such magnitude. And, of those, only a percentage by the age of 15, yet only one did all this being blind. The success of his invention, to date, is the only proof needed to show how he overcame his disability, who has set a place for himself in history, with title "hero".

Louis Braille dedicated his life to liberating the blind from their dependence on others. While he was teaching, he spent "so much of his life in such poor and damp conditions" which probably contributed to Louis Braille contracting tuberculosis in the twenties.". ("Louis Braille.RNIB) He stayed in these living conditions to teach the blind kids even though it was killing him. Helping the children to become independent was more important to Louis than his own life because he believed that was his purpose. He also believed, "All those years ago Louis Braille decided that it was crucial that he should be able to read and above all else to be able to write down his thoughts". Thus, his passion and dedication to reading were his sole life's purpose, knowing that he had to develop a way to learn to read for himself and other blind people. He knew the importance of words and ideas, and reading was a basic necessity that he could not live without. He felt the world needed to hear his ideas and thoughts as well as others, and his creation would offer these opportunities to all even the disabled. When Louis was on his deathbed, he was at peace, because he felt that he had fulfilled his purpose on the earth.

The creativity and intelligence of Louis Braille was the foundation that made it possible that his invention of the Braille Coding System could adapt to the needs that had to be met, which made the system simple, but genius, and thus, why Braille could be taught to everyone. In 1812, when Louis was about 12 years old, a former soldier, Charles Barbier visited Louis's school. Barbier had created an invention that was similar to Louis's except Barbier's invention was for soldiers to communicate at night. Louis took this difficult code, and made it easier to learn and more efficient. "Few inventions have been as simple yet liberating as Braille". (Blunkett) Braille's new, innovative system became much more popular and useful because it wasn't just for soldiers, but for everyday people. "Louis first published the new Braille alphabet in 1829 and revised it in 1937, including the letters from the French alphabet, mathematical symbols, and even musical notation was in there". (Ma'Ayan) Another difference between the two inventions was that Louis also invented a way to write using the Braille code. "He had a device, a grooved slate, to hold the paper, and a sliding ruler to guide the stylus. The ruler was pierced by little windows. By positioning the stylus in these openings, the blind person could punch dots across the page with precision" (Ma'Ayan). With the finished system, Braille accomplished his goal in life, but only Braille's characteristics of passion, dedication, creativity, and intelligence could make this invention not only work but also change the lives of every blind person after him in a better way.

Louis Braille suffered a tragedy at a young age and became blind. But he did not let it keep him from his destiny. He was driven to conquer his disability not only for himself but for all of humanity. Thus he developed a system so that he could read and learn and teach. He overcame his disability, dedicated his life to his invention and inspired the world to never give up. Everything Louis Braille has ever done will prove that he is the definition of a hero.

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What I am looking for is not "out there", it is in me. - Helen Keller Everybody is looking for something, but only some find what they are looking for. Some people don't realize that what they are looking for is within them. What happens when you can't look because you can't see?

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"I want to be an engineer, so I can make different things that make the world a better place, starting with my village."
Imagine designing and building your own windmill. Now imagine you're 14 years old, you live in Malawi in South Eastern Africa and the village where you live has no electricity.
It was 2002 when William Kamkwamba learned that he would no longer be able to continue his schooling. His family couldn't afford to pay the school fees, so William, all of 14 years old, took on the task of educating himself. With the help of mentor Dr. Hartford Mchazime and the Malawai Teacher Training Authority (USAID), William was able to keep his hungry mind fed. "I read a book (called) Using Energy by Mary Atwater." With this book, William was able to re-design a power-generating windmill... using mostly salvaged materials: wooden poles, broken pipes, old shoes, copper wires, his father's old bicycle, anything he could find that might work. And if he couldn't find it, William made it. PVC pipes were cut, heated and pounded until flat to serve as the blades for the windmill. "I had some problems because I was using a bicycle chain... so I had to remove it and use a fan belt from a car... and that works better..."

By Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando - William Kamkwamba, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7078410

One can't help but wonder what could motivate him to take on this Herculean task, but a recent phone call to William in Malawi answered our questions. "I decided to make a windmill after some problems in my family." William is one of seven children. He has six sisters - five of them are younger than him. "My sister was coughing from the paraffin candles... they smoke and are dangerous." With no electricity in his village, all lighting was done by candle... a commodity that would have to be regularly brought in from a market over ten kilometers away. William's windmill would mean electric light and just maybe... a healthier sister.

Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando (William's WindmillUploaded by Church of emacs) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

From a mish-mash of materials William erected his first working windmill at the age of 14. It generated enough energy to light his room. But this was only the beginning. William took an old oil barrel to a tinsmith and had him cut new, more efficient steel blades. With the use of his father's old bike, William turned up the gear ratio on his windmill, helping it to turn the turbine faster and thereby boost the power production. Now his windmill powers several light-bulbs as well as two radios. It supplies lighting power for the whole house as well as power to charge local cell-phones and a car battery for backup power. "Most of the time I like to listen to the radio but due to lack of batteries you could not...so that was another reason....and now I want to run the computer."

That computer is a result of William becoming a FELLOW at TED GLOBAL 2007. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design started in 1984 as a conference with people from these disciplines. Their mission: to spread ideas. "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other." William was invited to attend the most recent TEDGLOBAL conference in Tanzania by Emeka Okafor, the TEDGlobal curator. News of William and his accomplishments had been spreading through Africa, starting with an article in Malawi's Daily Times entitled, "School Drop-Out With a Streak of Genius" and spreading to the influential blog sites: TimbuktuChronicles, Soyapi Mumba, AfriGadget and others. William's humble, meaningful story about his windmill became the emotional highlight of the conference where people like Bono and Jane Goodall were also speaking.

Tom Rielly, Partnership Director, TED Conferences, said "When I first met William Kamkwamba, I was struck by his intelligence and ingenuity. He's overcome both the lack of access to education and the lack of monetary resources to set a great example for young people everywhere by making life better for his family. Now his sisters and he can read at night, listen to the radio and see television that helps make them part of the wider world. He inspires me everyday."

Africa means a great many things to a great many people. Many of us in the West hear only the disturbing parts... famine, war, epidemics. But there's another story to be told about Africa; the story of the so-called "Cheetahs," the people in Africa who aren't waiting for government or foreign aid or NGOs to solve their problems. They are the Africans who are standing up and saying, "The change begins with me. I am the answer." William is one such African.

"What I like about William," says fellow African blogger and friend, Soyapi Mumba, "He didn't join the multitude of people just blaming government or policy makers for his lack of education. Neither did he point fingers at (power companies) or his parents."

In building his windmill, William was forced to fabricate some of the electric components from scratch. For instance, "A light switch... that I made from plastic pipe and rubber from shoes and some springs." Also a circuit breaker. He's also designed a radio station that transmits to an audience within 100 square meters. But he figures that 20 square miles is what he really needs. His goal is to broadcast a message to his fellow Africans about not contracting HIV. "I googled 'how to make a radio amplifier'. I got a lot of information. Now I will think about how to make it work for me."

William is nineteen now and attending school, thanks to special interest from Dr. Hartford, deputy head of MTTA, who was so impressed by the boy that he arranged for his schooling to be covered by the government. The lucky school is the African Bible College Christian Academy in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi...about an hour south of where William's family lives.
William's heroes? After a brief discussion about heroes and who and what they may be...William said he has been inspired by many, but he would have to say that his mentors, Dr. Hartford Mchazime and Tom Rielly from TED are his heroes because "they have helped me to manage my plans and to make my plans possible."
And just what are William's plans? A few little things... like a sustainable future for his family, his village and ultimately the planet.

To follow William's progress, check out his blog.

Watch the trailer and go and see the feature film called, " The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," produced by BBC Films.

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"I want to be an engineer, so I can make different things that make the world a better place, starting with my village." Imagine designing and building your own windmill. Now imagine you're 14 years old, you live in Malawi in South Eastern Africa and the village where you live has no electricity.

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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary, Michelangelo.

Born out of wedlock to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later, he worked in Florence and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, all while attracting a large following of imitators and students. Upon the invitation of Francis I, he spent his last three years in France, where he died in 1519. Since his death, there has not been a time where his achievements, diverse interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have failed to incite interest and admiration, making him a frequent namesake and subject in culture.[vague ]

Leonardo is identified as one of the greatest painters in the history of art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major works-including numerous unfinished works-he created some of the most influential paintings in Western art. His magnum opus, the , is his best known work and often regarded as the world's most famous painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualized flying machines, a type of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine that could be used in an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

Early life (1452-1472)

Birth and background

Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. He was born out of wedlock to Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido; 1426-1504), a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi ( c. 1434 - 1494), from the lower-class. It remains uncertain where Leonardo was born; the traditional account, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the illegitimate birth, though it is still possible he was born in a house in Florence that Ser Piero almost certainly had. Leonardo's parents both married separately the year after his birth. Caterina-who later appears in Leonardo's notes as only "Caterina" or "Catelina"-is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed "L'Accattabriga" ("the quarrelsome one"). Other theories have been proposed, particularly that of art historian Martin Kemp, who suggested Caterina di Meo Lippi, an orphan who married purportedly with aid from Ser Piero and his family. Ser Piero married Albiera Amadori-having been betrothed to her the previous year-and after her death in 1464, went on to have three subsequent marriages. From all the marriages, Leonardo eventually had 16 half-siblings (of whom 11 survived infancy) who were much younger than he (the last was born when Leonardo was 46 years old) and with whom he had very little contact.

Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood and much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his biography in the frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) by the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years before then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the descendant of a long line of notaries, established an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and had a successful career. Despite his family history, Leonardo only received a basic and informal education in ( vernacular) writing, reading and mathematics, possibly because his artistic talents were recognised early, so his family decided to focus their attention there.

Later in life, Leonardo recorded his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus. While writing on the flight of birds, he recalled as an infant when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.

Verrocchio's workshop

In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence, which at the time was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around the age of 14, he became a garzone (studio boy) in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was about the time of the death of Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello. Leonardo became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years. Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such as Donatello's contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Much of the painting in Verrocchio's workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus' robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again, although this is believed to be an apocryphal story. Close examination reveals areas of the work that have been painted or touched-up over the tempera, using the new technique of oil paint, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of the figure of Jesus, bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. Leonardo may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of in the Bargello, and the Archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.

Vasari tells a story of Leonardo as a very young man: a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

First Florentine period (1472-c. 1482)

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate and live with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley (see below). According to Vasari, the young Leonardo was the first to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.

In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio, an indication of his independence from Verrocchio's studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers organized by the Medici met. In March 1481, he received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo went to offer his services to Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument-either a lute or lyre -in the form of a horse's head.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neoplatonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In 1482, Leonardo was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

First Milanese period (c. 1482-1499)

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled to Hungary (on behalf of Sforza) to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna. In 1490 he was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the cathedral of Pavia and was struck by the equestrian statue of Regisole, of which he left a sketch. Leonardo was employed on many other projects for Sforza, such as preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, and wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.

Contemporary correspondence records that Leonardo and his assistants were commissioned by the Duke of Milan to paint the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle. The decoration was completed in 1498. The project became a trompe-l'œil decoration that made the great hall appear to be a pergola created by the interwoven limbs of sixteen mulberry trees, whose canopy included an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling.

Second Florentine period (1500-1508)

When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men [and] women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were going to a solemn festival."

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo had left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year. By this same month, Leonardo had begun working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the , which he would continue working on until his twilight years. In January 1504, he was part of a committee formed to recommend where Michelangelo's statue of should be placed. He then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.

In 1506, Leonardo was summoned to Milan by Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of the city. There, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. The Council of Florence wished Leonardo to return promptly to finish The Battle of Anghiari, but he was given leave at the behest of Louis XII, who considered commissioning the artist to make some portraits. Leonardo may have commenced a project for an equestrian figure of d'Amboise; a wax model survives and, if genuine, is the only extant example of Leonardo's sculpture. Leonardo was otherwise free to pursue his scientific interests. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and Marco d'Oggiono. In 1507, Leonardo was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.

Second Milanese period (1508-1513)

By 1508, Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

In 1512, Leonardo was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo stayed in the city, spending several months in 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Rome and France (1513-1519)

In March 1513, Lorenzo de' Medici's son Giovanni assumed the papacy (as Leo X); Leonardo went to Rome that September, where he was received by the pope's brother Giuliano. From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere Courtyard in the Apostolic Palace, where Michelangelo and Raphael were both active. Leonardo was given an allowance of 33 ducats a month, and according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver. The pope gave him a painting commission of unknown subject matter, but cancelled it when the artist set about developing a new kind of varnish. Leonardo became ill, in what may have been the first of multiple strokes leading to his death. He practiced botany in the Gardens of Vatican City, and was commissioned to make plans for the pope's proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes. He also dissected cadavers, making notes for a treatise on vocal cords; these he gave to an official in hopes of regaining the pope's favor, but was unsuccessful.

In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. Leonardo was present at the 19 December meeting of Francis I and Leo X, which took place in Bologna. In 1516, Leonardo entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé, near the king's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. Being frequently visited by Francis, he drew plans for an immense castle town the king intended to erect at Romorantin, and made a mechanical lion, which during a pageant walked toward the king and-upon being struck by a wand-opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Leonardo was accompanied during this time by his friend and apprentice Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi. At some point, Melzi drew a portrait of Leonardo; the only others known from his lifetime were a sketch by an unknown assistant on the back of one of Leonardo's studies (c.  1517) and a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicting an elderly Leonardo with his right arm wrapped in clothing. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic when he was 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the Mona Lisa unfinished. He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari describes Leonardo as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done." Vasari states that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari also records that the king held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story may be legend rather than fact. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed Leonardo's casket. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving, as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo's other long-time pupil and companion, Salaì, and his servant Baptista de Vilanis, each received half of Leonardo's vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak. On 12 August 1519, Leonardo's remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise.

Salaì, or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One", i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490 as an assistant. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton," after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salaì executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salaì, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him many things about painting," his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio.

Salaì owned the Mona Lisa at the time of Leonardo's death in 1524, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait. Some 20 years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."

Personal life

Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "great physical beauty" and "infinite grace," as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect was his love for animals, likely including vegetarianism and according to Vasari, a habit of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now notable either in their fields or for their historical significance, including mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book Divina proportione in the 1490s. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. While on a journey that took him through Mantua, he drew a portrait of Isabella that appears to have been used to create a painted portrait, now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salaì and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in Saint John the Baptist and and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on his achievements as a painter. A handful of works that are either authenticated or attributed to him have been regarded as among the great masterpieces. These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities that have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter.

Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are his innovative techniques for laying on the paint; his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology; his interest in physiognomy and the way humans register emotion in expression and gesture; his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition; and his use of subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks.

Early works

Leonardo first gained attention for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at Verrocchio's workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 cm (5.5 in) high. It is a " predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 cm (85 in) long. In both Annunciations, Leonardo used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now generally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller painting, Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. Mary is not submissive, however, in the larger piece. The girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God, not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting, the young Leonardo presents the humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.

Paintings of the 1480s

In the 1480s, Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work that was of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

One of these paintings was Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Bortolon associates with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, as evidenced in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die." Although the painting is barely begun, the composition can be seen and is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture that forms part of the background. In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200×120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of San Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished: one remained at the chapel of the Confraternity, while Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not get their painting, however, nor the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Leonardo's most remarkable portrait of this period is the Lady with an Ermine, presumed to be Cecilia Gallerani ( c. 1483-1490), lover of Ludovico Sforza. The painting is characterised by the pose of the figure with the head turned at a very different angle to the torso, unusual at a date when many portraits were still rigidly in profile. The ermine plainly carries symbolic meaning, relating either to the sitter, or to Ludovico who belonged to the prestigious Order of the Ermine.

Paintings of the 1490s

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death, and shows the moment when Jesus has just said "one of you will betray me", and the consternation that this statement caused.

The writer Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

The painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterization, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined." Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface subject to mould and to flaking. Despite this, the painting remains one of the most reproduced works of art; countless copies have been made in various mediums.

Toward the end of this period, in 1498 da Vinci's trompe-l'œil decoration of the Sala delle Asse was painted for the Duke of Milan in the Castello Sforzesco.

Paintings of the 1500s

In 1505, Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Leonardo devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Michelangelo was assigned the opposite wall to depict the Battle of Cascina. Leonardo's painting deteriorated rapidly and is now known from a copy by Rubens.

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the or La Gioconda, the laughing one. In the present era, it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality perhaps due to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes such that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called " sfumato", or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari wrote that the smile was "so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original."

Other characteristics of the painting are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details; the dramatic landscape background, in which the world seems to be in a state of flux; the subdued colouring; and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils laid on much like tempera, and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed that the painting's quality would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape, which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harkens back to the Saint Jerome with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, Saint Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, influenced Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Leonardo was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body; the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre; a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem; and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre.

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that Leonardo would look for interesting faces in public to use as models for some of his work. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salaì, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salaì is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Pazzi conspiracy. In his notes, Leonardo recorded the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Like the two contemporary architects Donato Bramante (who designed the Belvedere Courtyard) and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

Journals and notes

Renaissance humanism recognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). They were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him. Leonardo's notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.

These notebooks-originally loose papers of different types and sizes-were largely entrusted to Leonardo's pupil and heir Francesco Melzi after the master's death. These were to be published, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing. Some of Leonardo's drawings were copied by an anonymous Milanese artist for a planned treatise on art c. 1570. After Melzi's death in 1570, the collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals. In 1587, a Melzi household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 of the manuscripts to Pisa; there, the architect Giovanni Magenta reproached Gavardi for having taken the manuscripts illicitly and returned them to Orazio. Having many more such works in his possession, Orazio gifted the volumes to Magenta. News spread of these lost works of Leonardo's, and Orazio retrieved seven of the 13 manuscripts, which he then gave to Pompeo Leoni for publication in two volumes; one of these was the Codex Atlanticus. The other six works had been distributed to a few others. After Orazio's death, his heirs sold the rest of Leonardo's possessions, and thus began their dispersal.

Some works have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus, and the British Library in London, which has put a selection from the Codex Arundel (BL Arundel MS 263) online. Works have also been at Holkham Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the private hands of John Nicholas Brown I and Robert Lehman. The Codex Leicester is the only privately owned major scientific work of Leonardo; it is owned by Bill Gates and displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Most of Leonardo's writings are in mirror-image cursive. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left. Leonardo used a variety of shorthand and symbols, and states in his notes that he intended to prepare them for publication. In many cases a single topic is covered in detail in both words and pictures on a single sheet, together conveying information that would not be lost if the pages were published out of order. Why they were not published during Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Science and inventions

Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasise experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. His keen observations in many areas were noted, such as when he wrote "Il sole non si move." ("The Sun does not move.")

In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book Divina proportione, published in 1509. While living in Milan, he studied light from the summit of Monte Rosa. Scientific writings in his notebook on fossils have been considered as influential on early palaeontology.

The content of his journals suggest that he was planning a series of treatises on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy is said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis d'Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by Melzi and eventually published as A Treatise on Painting in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into 62 editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art."

While Leonardo's experimentation followed scientific methods, a recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as a scientist by Fritjof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him in that, as a " Renaissance Man", his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting.

Anatomy and physiology

Leonardo started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.[citation needed ]

As a successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre, professor of Anatomy at the University of Pavia. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy. Only a small amount of the material on anatomy was published in Leonardo's Treatise on painting. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo's anatomical drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. The drawings and notation are far ahead of their time, and if published would undoubtedly have made a major contribution to medical science.

Leonardo also closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness. Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Leonardo's dissections and documentation of muscles, nerves, and vessels helped to describe the physiology and mechanics of movement. He attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression. He found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions. He made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles. He documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system. He was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. He created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns.

Engineering and inventions

During his lifetime, Leonardo was also valued as an engineer. With the same rational and analytical approach that moved him to represent the human body and to investigate anatomy, Leonardo studied and designed many machines and devices. He drew their "anatomy" with unparalleled mastery, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing, including a perfected "exploded view" technique, to represent internal components. Those studies and projects collected in his codices fill more than 5,000 pages. In a letter of 1482 to the lord of Milan Ludovico il Moro, he wrote that he could create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled from Milan to Venice in 1499, he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. In 1502, he created a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno river, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. He continued to contemplate the canalization of Lombardy's plains while in Louis XII's company and of the Loire and its tributaries in the company of Francis I. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, a mechanical knight, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight for much of his life, producing many studies, including Codex on the Flight of Birds ( c. 1505), as well as plans for several flying machines, such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. A 2003 documentary by British television station Channel Four, titled Leonardo's Dream Machines, various designs by Leonardo, such as a parachute and a giant crossbow, were interpreted and constructed. Some of those designs proved successful, whilst others fared less well when tested. Similarly, a team of engineers built ten machines designed by Da Vinci in the 2009 American television series Doing DaVinci, including a fighting vehicle and a self-propelled cart.

Research performed by Marc van den Broek revealed older prototypes for more than 100 inventions that are ascribed to Leonardo. Similarities between Leonardo's illustrations and drawings from the Middle Ages and from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Chinese and Persian Empires, and Egypt suggest that a large portion of Leonardo's inventions had been conceived before his lifetime. Leonardo's innovation was to combine different functions from existing drafts and set them into scenes that illustrated their utility. By reconstituting technical inventions he created something new.

In his notebooks, Leonardo first stated the 'laws' of sliding friction in 1493. His inspiration for investigating friction came about in part from his study of perpetual motion, which he correctly concluded was not possible. His results were never published and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated. For this contribution, Leonardo was named as the first of the 23 "Men of Tribology" by Duncan Dowson.

Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the " Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination." He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote." Scholars interpret his view of the world as being based in logic, though the empirical methods he used were unorthodox for his time.

Leonardo's fame within his own lifetime was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Interest in Leonardo and his work has never diminished. Crowds still queue to see his best-known artworks, T-shirts still bear his most famous drawing, and writers continue to hail him as a genius while speculating about his private life, as well as about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ( The Courtier), wrote in 1528: "...Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c.  1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf..." Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1568), opens his chapter on Leonardo:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius..." This is echoed by A.E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."

By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries." Art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge...Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe." The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana is a special collection at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Twenty-first-century author Walter Isaacson based much of his biography of Leonardo on thousands of notebook entries, studying the personal notes, sketches, budget notations, and musings of the man whom he considers the greatest of innovators. Isaacson was surprised to discover a "fun, joyous" side of Leonardo in addition to his limitless curiosity and creative genius.

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, between November 2019 and February 2020. The exhibit includes over 100 paintings, drawings and notebooks. Eleven of the paintings that Leonardo completed in his lifetime were included. Five of these are owned by the Louvre, but the Mona Lisa was not included because it is in such great demand among general visitors to the Louvre; it remains on display in its gallery. Vitruvian Man, however, is on display following a legal battle with its owner, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Salvator Mundi was also not included because its Saudi owner did not agree to lease the work.

The Mona Lisa, considered Leonardo's magnum opus, is often regarded as the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man drawing is also considered a cultural icon.

More than a decade of analysis of Leonardo's genetic genealogy, conducted by Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato, came to a conclusion in mid-2021. It was determined that the artist has 14 living male relatives. The work could also help determine the authenticity of remains thought to belong to Leonardo.

Location of remains

While Leonardo was certainly buried in the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise in 12 August 1519, the current location of his remains is unclear. Much of Château d'Amboise was damaged during the French Revolution, leading to the church's demolition in 1802. Some of the graves were destroyed in the process, scattering the bones interred there and thereby leaving the whereabouts of Leonardo's remains subject to dispute; a gardener may have even buried some in the corner of the courtyard.

In 1863, fine-arts inspector general Arsène Houssaye received an imperial commission to excavate the site and discovered a partially complete skeleton with a bronze ring on one finger, white hair, and stone fragments bearing the inscriptions "EO", "AR", "DUS", and "VINC"-interpreted as forming "Leonardus Vinci". The skull's eight teeth corresponds to someone of approximately the appropriate age and a silver shield found near the bones depicts a beardless Francis I, corresponding to the king's appearance during Leonardo's time in France.

Houssaye postulated that the unusually large skull was an indicator of Leonardo's intelligence; author Charles Nicholl describes this as a "dubious phrenological deduction". At the same time, Houssaye noted some issues with his observations, including that the feet were turned toward the high altar, a practice generally reserved for laymen, and that the skeleton of 1.73 metres (5.7 ft) seemed too short.[failed verification - see discussion] Art historian Mary Margaret Heaton wrote in 1874 that the height would be appropriate for Leonardo. The skull was allegedly presented to Napoleon III before being returned to the Château d'Amboise, where they were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874. A plaque above the tomb states that its contents are only presumed to be those of Leonardo.

It has since been theorized that the folding of the skeleton's right arm over the head may correspond to the paralysis of Leonardo's right hand. In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests would be conducted to determine whether the attribution is correct. The DNA of the remains will be compared to that of samples collected from Leonardo's work and his half-brother Domenico's descendants; it may also be sequenced.

In 2019, documents were published revealing that Houssaye had kept the ring and a lock of hair. In 1925, his great-grandson sold these to an American collector. Sixty years later, another American acquired them, leading to them being displayed at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci beginning on 2 May 2019, the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

General

1. See Nicholl (2005, pp. 17-20) and Bambach (2019, p. 24) for further information on the dispute and uncertainty surrounding Leonardo's exact birthplace.

2. ; LEE-ə-NAR-doh də VIN-chee, LEE-oh-, LAY-oh-

3. (^ Italian: [leoˈnardo di ˈsɛr ˈpjɛːro da (v)ˈvintʃi] listen ) The inclusion of the title 'ser' (shortening of Italian Messer or Messere, title of courtesy prefixed to the first name) indicates that Leonardo's father was a gentleman.

4. The diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio relays a precise account: "There was born to me a grandson, son of [ [^ Ser Piero fr], on 15 April, a Saturday, at the third hour of the night." Ser Antonio records Leonardo being baptized the following day by Piero di Bartolomeo at the parish of Santa Croce it].

5. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean" or even of Chinese descent. According to art critic ^ Alessandro Vezzosi, head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a slave called Caterina.[19] The reconstruction of one of Leonardo's fingerprints shows a pattern that matches 60% of people of Middle Eastern origin, suggesting the possibility that Leonardo may have had Middle Eastern blood. The claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine: "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences, especially if looking at only one finger". More recently, historian Martin Kemp, after digging through overlooked archives and records in Italy, found evidence that Leonardo's mother was a young local woman identified as Caterina di Meo Lippi.[20]

6. ^ He also never wrote about his father, except a passing note of his death in which he overstates his age by three years. Leonardo's siblings caused him difficulty after his father's death in a dispute over their inheritance.

7. The humanist influence of Donatello's ^ David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist.

8. The "diverse arts" and technical skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th-century text ^ On Divers Arts by Theophilus Presbyter and in the early 15th-century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.

9. ^ On the back he wrote: "I, staying with Anthony, am happy," possibly in reference to his father.

10. Both works are lost. The entire composition of Michelangelo's painting is known from a copy by Aristotole da Sangallo, 1542.^ [67] Leonardo's painting is known only from preparatory sketches and several copies of the centre section, of which the best known, and probably least accurate, is by Peter Paul Rubens.

11. It is unknown for what occasion the mechanical lion was made, but it is believed to have greeted the king at his entry into ^ Lyon and perhaps was used for the peace talks between the French king and Pope Leo X in Bologna. A conjectural recreation of the lion has been made and is on display in the Museum of Bologna.[80]

12. Identified via its similarity to Leonardo's ^ presumed self-portrait[83]

13. "... Messer Lunardo Vinci [^ sic] ... an old graybeard of more than 70 years ... showed His Excellency three pictures ... from whom, since he was then subject to a certain paralysis of the right hand, one could not expect any more good work."

14. This scene is portrayed in romantic paintings by ^ Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as Angelica Kauffman.

15. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the king at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King Francis cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed, but the edict was not signed by the king.[91]

16. The painting, which in the 18th century belonged to ^ Angelica Kauffman, was later cut up. The two main sections were found in a junk shop and cobbler's shop and were reunited. It is probable that outer parts of the composition are missing.

17. He also drew with his left hand, his ^ hatch strokes "slanting down from left to right-the natural stroke of a left-handed artist". He also sometimes wrote conventionally with his right hand.[134]

18. ^ Salvator Mundi, a painting by Leonardo depicting Jesus holding an orb, sold for a world record US$450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017.[168] The highest known sale price for any artwork was previously US$300 million, for Willem de Kooning's Interchange, which was sold privately in September 2015.[169] The highest price previously paid for a work of art at auction was for Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, which sold for US$179.4 million in May 2015 at Christie's New York.[169]

Dates of works

References

Early

Modern

Works cited

Books

Arasse, Daniel [in French] (1998). Leonardo da Vinci. Old Saybrook: Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 978-1-56852-198-5.

Bortolon, Liana (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. London: Paul Hamlyn.

Clark, Kenneth (1961). Leonardo da Vinci. City of Westminster: Penguin Books. OCLC 187223.

Gasca, Ana Millàn; Nicolò, Fernando; Lucertini, Mario (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-7643-6940-8.

Heaton, Mary Margaret (1874). Leonardo Da Vinci and His Works: Consisting of a Life of Leonardo Da Vinci. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 1706262.

Martindale, Andrew (1972). . Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-56006-8.

O'Malley, Charles D.; Sounders, J.B. de C.M. (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. New York: Henry Schuman.

Pedretti, Carlo (1982). Leonardo, a study in chronology and style. Cambridge: Johnson Reprint Corp. ISBN 978-0-384-45281-7.

Popham, A.E. (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60462-8.

Richter, Jean Paul (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2. volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition

Wallace, Robert (1972) [1966]. The World of Leonardo: 1452-1519. New York: Time-Life Books.

Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1204-2.

Vezzosi, Alessandro (1997). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man. 'New Horizons' series. Translated by Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra (English translation ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-30081-7.

Journals and encyclopedia articles

Further reading

See Kemp (2003) and Bambach (2019, pp. 442-579) for extensive bibliographies

External links

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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.

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Kids learn about the biography of Marie Curie, woman scientist who worked on radioactivity and won two Nobel prizes for science.

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Koala rescue - Team deployed to save animals from horrors of Australia bushfires

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Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 - 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA ( self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). The apparatus assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.

Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004, when Fahrenheit 9/11 received the award. It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957.

From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.

"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before,
the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."

Jacques Cousteau

Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, France, to Daniel and Élisabeth Cousteau. He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau completed his preparatory studies at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. However, an automobile accident, which broke both his arms, cut short his career in naval aviation. The accident forced Cousteau to change his plans to become a naval pilot, so he then indulged his passion for the ocean.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the , Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles, predecessors of modern swimming goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935-1938) and in the USSR (1939).

On 12 July 1937, he married Simone Melchior, his business partner, with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940-1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the . In 1991, six months after his wife Simone's death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son, Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982, during Cousteau's marriage to his first wife).

The years of World War II were decisive for the history of diving. After the armistice of 1940, the family of Simone and Jacques-Yves Cousteau took refuge in Megève, where he became a friend of the Ichac family who also lived there. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Marcel Ichac shared the same desire to reveal to the general public unknown and inaccessible places - for Cousteau the underwater world and for Ichac the high mountains. The two neighbors took the first ex-aequo prize of the Congress of Documentary Film in 1943, for the first French underwater film: Par dix-huit mètres de fond ( 18 meters deep), made without breathing apparatus the previous year in the Embiez islands in Var, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, using a depth-pressure-proof camera case developed by mechanical engineer Léon Vèche, an engineer of Arts and Measures at the Naval College.

In 1943, they made the film Épaves ( Shipwrecks), in which they used two of the very first Aqua-Lung prototypes. These prototypes were made in Boulogne-Billancourt by the Air Liquide company, following instructions from Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. When making Épaves, Cousteau could not find the necessary blank reels of movie film, but had to buy hundreds of small still camera film reels the same width, intended for a make of child's camera, and cemented them together to make long reels.

Having kept bonds with the English speakers (he spent part of his childhood in the United States and usually spoke English) and with French soldiers in North Africa (under Admiral Lemonnier), Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whose villa "Baobab" at Sanary ( Var) was opposite Admiral Darlan's villa "Reine"), helped the French Navy to join again with the Allies; he assembled a commando operation against the Italian espionage services in France, and received several military decorations for his deeds. At that time, he kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a "pen anti-semite" who wrote the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout ( I am everywhere) and who received the death sentence in 1946. However, this was later commuted to a life sentence, and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954.

During the 1940s, Cousteau is credited with improving the Aqua-Lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (1953), Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan. In 1943 Cousteau tried out the first prototype Aqua-Lung which finally made extended underwater exploration possible.

Late 1940s: GERS and Élie Monnier

In 1946, Cousteau and Tailliez showed the film Épaves ("Shipwrecks") to Admiral Lemonnier, who gave them the responsibility of setting up the Groupement de Recherches Sous-marines (GRS) (Underwater Research Group) of the French Navy in Toulon. A little later it became the GERS (Groupe d'Études et de Recherches Sous-Marines, = Underwater Studies and Research Group), then the COMISMER ("COMmandement des Interventions Sous la MER", = "Undersea Interventions Command"), and finally more recently the CEPHISMER. In 1947, Chief Petty Officer Maurice Fargues became the first diver to die using an aqualung, while attempting a new depth record with the GERS near Toulon.

In 1948, between missions of mine clearance, underwater exploration and technological and physiological tests, Cousteau undertook a first campaign in the Mediterranean on board the sloop Élie Monnier, with Philippe Tailliez, Frédéric Dumas, Jean Alinat and the scenario writer Marcel Ichac. The small team also undertook the exploration of the Roman wreck of Mahdia (Tunisia). It was the first underwater archaeology operation using autonomous diving, opening the way for scientific underwater archaeology. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac brought back from there the Carnets diving film (presented and preceded with the Cannes Film Festival 1951).

Cousteau and the Élie Monnier then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3.

The adventures of this period are told in the two books The Silent World (1953, by Cousteau and Dumas) and Plongées sans câble (1954, by Philippe Tailliez).

1950-1970s

In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy.

In 1950, he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic one franc a year. Cousteau refitted the Calypso as a mobile laboratory for field research and as his principal vessel for diving and filming. He also carried out underwater archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, in particular at Grand-Congloué (1952).

With the publication of his first book in 1953, The Silent World, Cousteau correctly predicted the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. He reported that his research vessel, the Élie Monier, was heading to the Straits of Gibraltar and noticed a group of porpoises following them. Cousteau changed course a few degrees off the optimal course to the center of the strait, and the porpoises followed for a few minutes, then diverged toward mid-channel again. It was evident that they knew where the optimal course lay, even if the humans did not. Cousteau concluded that the cetaceans had something like sonar, which was a relatively new feature on submarines.

In 1954, Cousteau conducted a survey of Abu Dhabi waters on behalf of British Petroleum. Among those accompanying him was Louis Malle who made a black-and-white film of the expedition for the company. Cousteau won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for The Silent World co-produced with Malle. In 1957, Cousteau took over as leader of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Afterward, with the assistance of Jean Mollard, he made a "diving saucer" SP-350, an experimental underwater vehicle which could reach a depth of 350 meters. The successful experiment was quickly repeated in 1965 with two vehicles which reached 500 meters.

In 1957, he was elected as director of the Oceanographical Museum of Monaco. He directed Précontinent, about the experiments of diving in saturation (long-duration immersion, houses under the sea), and was admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

He was involved in the creation of Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques and served as its inaugural president from 1959 to 1973.

Cousteau also took part in inventing the "SP-350 Denise Diving Saucer" in 1959 which was an invention best for exploring the ocean floor, as it allowed one to explore on solid ground.

In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The CEA argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. Romanovsky and other French scientists, including Louis Fage and Jacques Cousteau, repudiated the claim, saying that Romanovsky had in mind a much smaller amount. The CEA claimed that there was little circulation (and hence little need for concern) at the dump site between Nice and Corsica, but French public opinion sided with the oceanographers rather than with the CEA atomic energy scientists. The CEA chief, Francis Perrin, decided to postpone the dump. Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and it was sent back to its origin.

In the 1960s, Cousteau was involved with a set of three projects to build underwater "villages"; the projects were named Precontinent I, Precontinent II and Precontinent III. Each ensuing project was aimed at increasing the depth at which people continuously lived under water, and were an attempt at creating an environment in which men could live and work on the sea floor. The projects are best known as Conshelf I (1962), Conshelf II (1963), and Conshelf III (1965). The names "Precontinent", and "Continental Shelf Station" (Conshelf) were used interchangeably by Cousteau.

A meeting with American television companies ( ABC, Métromédia, NBC) created the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress intended to give the films a "personalized adventure" style. This documentary television series ran for ten years from 1966 to 1976. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.

In 1970, he wrote the book The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea with his son Philippe. In this book, Cousteau described the oceanic whitetip shark as "the most dangerous of all sharks".

In December 1972, two years after the volcano's last eruption, The Cousteau Society was filming Voyage au bout du monde on Deception Island, Antarctica, when Michel Laval, Calypso's second in command, was struck and killed by a rotor of the helicopter that was ferrying between Calypso and the island.

In 1973, along with his two sons and Frederick Hyman, he created the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, Frederick Hyman being its first President.

In 1975, John Denver released the tribute song " Calypso" on his album , and on the B-side of his hit song " I'm Sorry". "Calypso" became a hit on its own and was later considered the new A-side, reaching No. 2 on the charts.

In 1976, Cousteau located the wreck of HMHS Britannic. He also found the wreck of the French 17th-century ship-of-the-line in coastal waters of Crete.

In 1977, together with Peter Scott, he received the UN International Environment prize.

On 28 June 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, his second son Philippe, his preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969, died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon. Cousteau was deeply affected. He called his eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel, to his side. This collaboration lasted 14 years.

1980-1990s

From 1980 to 1981, he was a regular on the animal reality show Those Amazing Animals, along with Burgess Meredith, Priscilla Presley, and Jim Stafford.

In 1980, Cousteau traveled to Canada to make two films on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Cries from the Deep and St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea.

In 1985, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

From 1986 to 1992, Cousteau released Rediscovery of the World.

On 24 November 1988, he was elected to the Académie française, chair 17, succeeding Jean Delay. His official reception under the cupola took place on 22 June 1989, the response to his speech of reception being given by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. After his death, he was replaced by Érik Orsenna on 28 May 1998.

In June 1990, the composer Jean Michel Jarre paid homage to the commander by entitling his new album Waiting for Cousteau. He also composed the music for Cousteau's documentary " Palawan, the last refuge".

On 2 December 1990, his wife, Simone Cousteau died of cancer.

In June 1991, in Paris, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remarried, to Francine Triplet, with whom he had (before this marriage) two children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Francine Cousteau currently continues her husband's work as the head of the Cousteau Foundation and Cousteau Society. From that point, the relations between Jacques-Yves and his elder son, who is 8 years older than Francine, worsened.

In November 1991, Cousteau gave an interview to the UNESCO Courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. Widely quoted on the Internet are these two paragraphs from the interview: "What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It's a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species...It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable".

In 1992, he was invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations' International Conference on Environment and Development, and then he became a regular consultant for the UN and the World Bank.

In 1995, Cousteau became involved in a legal battle with his son Jean-Michel, who was advertising the "Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort" in the South Pacific, to prevent him from using the Cousteau name for business purposes in the United States. This resulted in Jean-Michel Cousteau being ordered by the court to not encourage confusion between his for-profit business and his father's non-profit endeavours.

On 11 January 1996, Calypso was accidentally rammed and sunk in the port of Singapore by a barge. The Calypso was refloated and towed home to France.

Though he was not particularly a religious man, Cousteau believed that the teachings of the different major religions provide valuable ideals and thoughts to protect the environment. In a Chapter entitled "The Holy Scriptures and The Environment" in the posthumous work The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, he is quoted as stating that "The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists".

Cousteau said that just because fish are cold-blooded does not mean they do not feel pain, and that recreational fishermen only say so to reassure their conscience.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau died of a heart attack on 25 June 1997 in Paris, two weeks after his 87th birthday. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac, his birthplace. An homage was paid to him by the town by naming the street which runs out to the house of his birth "rue du Commandant Cousteau", where a commemorative plaque was placed.

Cousteau's legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.

Cousteau liked to call himself an "oceanographic technician". He was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher, and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans.

His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticized at the time by some academics. The so-called " divulgationism", a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.

His Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, and perhaps even he himself, has been identified as introducing the Caulerpa "Killer Algae," which is destroying much of the Mediterranean's ecosystem.

The Cousteau Society and its French counterpart, l'Équipe Cousteau, both of which Jacques-Yves Cousteau founded, are still active today. The Society is currently attempting to turn the original into a museum and it is raising funds to build a successor vessel, the Calypso II.

In 2007, the International Watch Company introduced the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph "Cousteau Divers" Special Edition. The timepiece incorporated a sliver of wood from the interior of Cousteau's Calypso research vessel. Having developed the diver's watch, IWC offered support to The Cousteau Society. The proceeds from the timepieces' sales were partially donated to the non-profit organization involved in conservation of marine life and preservation of tropical coral reefs.

Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, is in the process of constructing a community of ocean flooring analysis stations, called Proteus, off Curaçao at a depth of about 20 m in a marine-protected area. Aquanauts could reside and work in these underwater habitats. Front-end engineering has started in 2022 with the habitat put on the sea bottom in 2025.

During his lifetime, Jacques-Yves Cousteau received these distinctions:

The Silent World (1953, with Frédéric Dumas)

Captain Cousteaus Underwater Treasury (1959, with James Dugan)

The Living Sea (1963, with James Dugan)

World Without Sun (1965)

The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1970-1975, 8-volumes, with Philippe Diolé)

The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970)

Diving for Sunken Treasure (1971)

Life and Death in a Coral Sea (1971)

The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (1972)

Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973)

Three Adventures: Galápagos, Titicaca, the Blue Holes (1973)

Diving Companions: Sea Lion, Elephant Seal, Walrus (1974)

Dolphins (1975)

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau (1973-78, 21 volumes)

A Bill of Rights for Future Generations (1979)

Life at the Bottom of the World (1980)

The Cousteau United States Almanac of the Environment (1981, a.k.a. The Cousteau Almanac of the Environment: An Inventory of Life on a Water Planet)

Jacques Cousteau's Calypso (1983, with Alexis Sivirine)

Marine Life of the Caribbean (1984, with James Cribb and Thomas H. Suchanek)

Jacques Cousteau's Amazon Journey (1984, with Mose Richards)

Jacques Cousteau: The Ocean World (1985)

The Whale (1987, with Philippe Diolé)

Jacques Cousteau: Whales (1988, with Yves Paccalet)

The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus (and Susan Schiefelbein, coauthor; Bloomsbury 2007)

Jacques Cousteau has been portrayed in films:

The American comedy film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by Wes Anderson and first released in December 2004, portrays Steve Zissou, a fictional oceanographer strongly inspired by Jacques Cousteau.

The French film The Odyssey, directed by Jérôme Salle and first released in October 2016, focuses on Cousteau's life, especially regarding his relation with his first wife, Simone Melchior, and his second son, Philippe Cousteau.

Jacques Cousteau was featured in Epic Rap Battle of History's sixth season, and was portrayed by Peter Shukoff. He faced off against Steve Irwin, portrayed by Lloyd Ahlquist.

1. ^ Lunn, Rosemary E. (8 March 2021). "WDHOF announces new Simone Melchior Cousteau Grant". X-Ray International Dive Magazine. Archived from the original on 28 July 2021.

2. ^ The Silent World. J. Y. Cousteau with Frédéric Dumas. Hamish Hamilton, London. 1953

3. Capitaine de frégate PHILIPPE TAILLIEZ, ^ Plongées sans câble, Arthaud, Paris, January 1954, Dépôt légal 1er trimestre 1954 - Édition N° 605 - Impression N° 243 (in French)

4. ^ Sevellec, E.J. (1 December 2006). "Naissance du GERS et des premiers plongeurs démineurs" (in French). Philippe.tailliez.net. According to Sevellec, the Élie Monnier was an old German tugboat originally called Albatros and handed over to France as a war reparation, and then re-baptised in honor of the maritime engineer Élie Monnier who had disappeared while diving at Mers-el-Kébir on the wreck of the battleship

5. ^ Riffaud, C. (1988). "La règne du scaphandre à casque", in La grande aventure des hommes sous la mer. Users.skynet.be. ISBN 2-226-03502-8.

6. ^ Morton, Michael Quentin (June 2015). "Calypso in the Arabian Gulf: Jacques Cousteau's Undersea Survey of 1954". Liwa. 5 (9): 3-28.

7. ^ Hamblin, Jacob Darwin (2008). Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0813542201.

8. Cousteau, Jacques; ed. by Schiefelbein, Susan. 2010. ^ The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781596917552

9. ^ "L'Odyssée : Lambert Wilson dans la peau de Cousteau". Le Figaro. 23 August 2016.

10. ^ "Ce que le biopic sur Cousteau, "L'Odyssée", nous apprend de son côté obscur". The Huffington Post (French Edition). Archived from the original on 17 October 2016.

Undersea Explorer: The Story of Captain Cousteau (1957) by James Dugan

Jacques Cousteau and the Undersea World (2000) by Roger King

Jacques-Yves Cousteau: His Story Under the Sea (2002) by John Bankston

Jacques Cousteau: A Life Under the Sea (2008) by Kathleen Olmstead

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Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 - 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA ( self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). The apparatus assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.

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Learn about Thomas Edison's biography. He invented many useful items including the practical light bulb and phonograph. He also helped to found the business General Electric.

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Kids learn about the biography of entrepreneur Walt Disney including early life, work as an artist, beginning animation, movies and television, theme parks, and fun facts.

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Anne Frank was born to Otto Frank and his wife Edith on June 12, 1929. They named her Annelies Marie. She had a sister Margot who was three years older. They were a Jewish family living in Germany. Their families had lived in Germany for centuries.

By 1932 Adolph Hitler had risen to power in Germany and instead of enjoying a democracy, the German people now suffered under the rule of a dictator. Hitler blamed the Jews for all the problems in the country. Otto realized it was becoming unsafe for his family in Germany and moved them to the Netherlands. He set up a company in Amsterdam making a product that the women used to make homemade jam. It was called Opekta. (Pectinis derived from fruits and will cause jelly and jam to jell. In America you can buy a pectin product called Sure Jell.)

The family was safe for a while, but then in 1940 the Germans invaded the Netherlands and began to arrest and persecute the Jews there. They put restrictions on the Jews and made them wear an identifying yellow star on their clothes. They could not own a business. They could not ride a bicycle. Life became very hard, and the Jews feared for their lives.

Margot, Anne's sister was called to report to a work camp in Germany. The family had been planning a hiding place, but with Margot's call-up they knew they had to hide immediately. And so they did. The date was July 6, 1942.

The hiding place became known as the Secret Annex. It was located at 263 Prinsengracht. The Frank family would occupy two rooms on the first floor. A week later Mr. and Mrs. Van Pels and their son would move into the two rooms on the second floor. From Peter's tiny room they could access the attic where food was stored. There was a small bathroom on the first floor.

The first thing they did was make curtains to prevent anyone from seeing in. An eighth person, Fritz Pfeffer, an older man, a dentist, arrived in November and would share a room with Anne.

Father Voskuijl made a movable bookcase to hide the door through which they entered their quarters.

This picture shows the streetside view of the building. Otto Frank's offices were at the front of the building and the hiding place was at the rear.

There were four people who helped them during the two years and 30 days they were in hiding. Miep Gies, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl provided food for them, and at great personal risk to their own lives visited daily and brought news from the outside world.

The people in hiding must be very quiet when the warehouse workers are at work downstairs. They can move around when the men are gone for lunch, and at 5:30 in the afternoon when the workers leave the building Anne and the others are free to go downstairs into the office area. Anne calls it their "nightly freedom".

The Franks had brought school books for an extended stay and library books are brought to the group weekly. They spend a lot of time reading, studying, and working correspondence courses.

Anne writes in her diary. She creates an imaginary friend "Kitty" with whom she shares her innermost thoughts in her writings. Sometimes she writes short stories. After hearing on a radio broadcast that there would be a collection of the diaries and writings made during the war, Anne begins to think about making her writings into a book. After a lot of thought she decides she will call it "Achterhuis" (Secret Annex).

She begins rewriting her entries, leaving out some very personal items she would rather not share. For over two months she works rewriting her diaries.

On August 4, 1944 the people in hiding were discovered. Someone, they never found out who, betrayed them and a Secret Service officer and three men of the Dutch police force came up the stairs, entered with guns, and herded them away to jail. The two men who had been helping them were also arrested and taken to the city prison. The two women helpers, Miep and Bep, were left behind. They went into Anne's small room. Her diaries were scattered all over the floor. They collected them and Miep kept them.

The eight people are taken to a transit camp, Westerbork. From that camp people are taken to extermination and concentration camps. During the month they are there they have to break up old batteries. On September 2, 1944 their names appear on the list of people to be moved. They are put on freight cars and three days later they arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The people in the freight cars were divided. Men and women were separated and then they were divided into groups; one group would go to labor camps, and those who could not work would be killed in the gas chamber.

By the end of October Anne and her sister Margot are transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen. They both become ill there and died of typhus in March of 1945. They died just a few weeks before the British Army arrived and freed the prisoners.

The four helpers survived the war and so did Anne's father Otto Frank. He searched desperately for word of the fate of his family. Finally in July he met two sisters who witnessed the death of Anne and Margot.

After Otto learned of the death of his daughters, Miep gave him the pages of the diary she had been saving. He was surprised at the depth of her writings. This was an Anne he never knew. He honored her wish to have her writings published as a book. First the book was published in the Dutch language, then German, French, and English. The book was made into a stage play, then into a film.

Today when you see the word "Holocaust"it usually refers to this time in which the German Army systematicallykilled nearly 6 million Jews. People need to learn about the Holocaust and the reasons why it happened, lest periods of hatred and discrimination cause a similar genocide. Some say it never happened at all, but we know it did because there are too many witnesses and survivors who lived to tell the world about those darkest of times.

Today if you visit the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp you can see a memorial to Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

This biography by Patsy Stevens, a retired teacher, was written in 2007.

Play an Online Game at Quia

From Word Central's Student Dictionary
by Merriam - Webster
(Pronunciation note: the schwa sound is shown by ə)

'hoe-lə-cost or hau-lə-caust
Function: noun
1 : a sacrifice destroyed by fire
2 : a thorough destruction especially by fire
3 often capitalized : the killing of European civilians
and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II

Pronunciation: 'jen-ə-side
Function: noun
the deliberate destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

Function: noun
a camp where persons (as prisoners of war, political prisoners, or refugees)
are detained

Pronunciation: sis-tə-'mat-ik
Function: adjective
carried out or acting with thoroughness or regularity
sys-tem-at-i-cal-ly, adverb

Pronunciation: 'dəch
Function: adjective
of or relating to the Netherlands, its inhabitants, or their language

Pronunciation: 'die-ə-re
Function: noun
a daily record especially of personal experiences and thoughts;
also : a book for keeping such a record

'pek-tən
Function: noun
any of various substances in plant tissues that dissolve
in water and produce a gel which is the basis of fruit jellies;
also : a commercial product rich in pectins

Anne Frank's History

Anne Frank Center - USA Website

Article: The Lessons of Anne Frank

Anne Frank in the World 1929 - 1945
Teacher workbook, Utah Education Network

Anne Frank
at Wikipedia

United State Holocaust Memorial Museum
watch videos of survivors of the Holocaust

English Lesson Plan on Anne Frank

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust

Anne Frank Lesson Plan
Lesson Snips.com
(You must register. Some lessons free)

Lessons From the Holocaust
Lesson Snips.com
(You must register to access lessons.)

Anne Frank Channel on YouTube
subscribe (free) and watch videos

At biography.com search for Anne Frank.
Scroll the panel for the "Video & Audio Results".

Press "Go" to search for books about Anne Frank

A LIBRARY OF
ONLINE BOOKS and BOOK PREVIEWS

Order the following books from Amazon.

Anne Frank
by David Colbert (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank
by Yona Zeldis McDonough, Malcah Zeldis (selected pages) Order here

Who Was Anne Frank?
by Ann Abramson, Nancy Harrison (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank
by Anne Schraff (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust
by Carol Ann Lee (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank and Me (stage play)
by Cherie Bennett, Jeff Gottesfeld (selected pages) Order here

The play of the diary of Anne Frank
by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Anne Frank (selected pages) Order here

The World of Anne Frank: a complete resource guide
by Betty Merti (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, the Biography
by Melissa Muller (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, Life in Hiding
by Johanna Hurwitz (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank: Hidden Hope
by Rita Thievon Mullin (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Scholastic Literature Guide Grades 4-8)
(selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family
by Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank: The Young Writer Who Told the World Her Story (National Geographic)
by Ann Kramer (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank Reading Guide
by Jenny Sime (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, People We Should Know (Weekly Reader)
by Jonatha A. Brown (selected pages)

Anne Frank: Young Diarist
by Ruth Ashby (selected pages)

Anne Frank, Bio Graphics
by Joe Dunn, Ben Dunn (selected pages)

A Picture Book of Anne Frank
by David A. Adler, Karen Ritz (selected pages)

The Life of Anne Frank, Graphic edition
by Nicholas Saunders (selected pages)

Anne Frank, History Maker Bios
by Laura Hamilton Waxman (selected pages)

Diary of Anne Frank, the Play
by Anne Frank, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett (selected pages)

Puzzles on these pages courtesy of
Songs of Praise and Armored Penguin

Photos courtesy Wikipedia,

Photo of a replica of Anne Frank's diary courtesy of Flickr user jim 12957

Photo of the Statue Anne Frank in Utrecht by Wikipedia user Brbbl

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Anne Frank was born to Otto Frank and his wife Edith on June 12, 1929. They named her Annelies Marie. She had a sister Margot who was three years older. They were a Jewish family living in Germany. Their families had lived in Germany for centuries.

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Do Not Open this Book | Kids Books Read Aloud for Children

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Tomar conciencia de cómo nuestras acciones y palabras impactan en los demás.

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El niño y los clavos | Cuento infantil para trabajar el respeto 🔨

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by Jim Hawkins from Children's Hospice International

When I grow up, I want to be a peacemaker. My biggest role model for this is Jimmy Carter, who has been a wonderful peanut farmer, politician, and peacemaker... I call him the 'perfect hero. - Mattie Stepanek

Jim Hawkins Mattie suffered from a hereditary disease called dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, a rare form of muscular dystrophy that had already claimed the lives of his three older siblings. Mattie's mother, Jeni, also suffers from the same disease. Mattie needed to take a portable oxygen tank on wheels with him wherever he went. Many times his illness would land him in bed in the intensive care unit of the children's hospital. Outside, Mattie was only able to move about in his motorized wheelchair. Even though Mattie battled a terminal illness for many years, Mattie never saw his condition as an obstacle between him and his goals.

He began writing when he was about 3 years old. Before he passed away in June, 2004, Mattie had written thousands of poems, dozens of essays and short stories, and presented a bound anthology of his writing to the Library of Congress. He received many awards for his writing, including the Melinda A. Lawrence International Book Award in 1999 for "most inspirational work."

Here is a sample of his poetry:

On Being a Champion

A Champion is a winner,
A hero...
Someone who never gives up
Even when the going gets rough.
A champion is a member of
A winning team...
Someone who overcomes challenges
Even when it requires creative solutions.
A champion is an optimist,
A hopeful spirit...
Someone who plays the game,
Even when the game is called life.
There can be a champion in each of us,
If we live as a winner,
If we live as a member of the team,
If we live with a hopeful spirit,
For Life.

From the book JOURNEY THROUGH HEARTSONGS by Mattie J.T. Stepanek. Copyright (c) 2001 Mattie J.T. Stepanek. Published by Hyperion. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Jim Hawkins His love of reading and writing evolved into public speaking, earning him the Maryland State Goodwill Ambassadorship for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. During his short lifetime, he enthusiastically participated in fundraising events to help find a cure for neuromuscular diseases, and to encourage children and families suffering from these diseases to celebrate life until a cure is found.

In Mattie's words, ". . .we must remember to play after every storm and to celebrate the gift of life as we have it, or else life becomes a task, rather than a gift. We must always listen to the song in our heart, and share that song with others."

Little Mattie has somehow acquired more wisdom in his short life than most of us do after decades of living. Through his poetry, he expresses wisdom in a way that touches anyone's heart. With his unabashed enthusiasm for life Mattie has charmed everyone who has crossed his path. Mattie has inspired many people, young and old, to overcome every obstacle they may encounter and strive for their goals with dignity and humanity. THANK YOU, MATTIE!
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Extra Info

Jeni Stepanek wrote in the MY HERO Guestbook: My hero is: Mattie Stepanek, my son. Through Mattie's innocent and uncensored expressions about life as he sees it, and feels it, and thinks about it, I have been inspired to think more deeply about my own life. Sometimes, it takes the wisdom of a child, for us to really appreciate what we DO have in life, and to remember to celebrate the gift of every day. Lyn Mox added this comment about MATTIE in the MY HERO Guestbook: My hero is: Mattie Stepanek. Just wanted to say that in my personal life, Mattie is my hero and glad to see that someone else outside of my family and friends agrees. Mattie is friends and schoolmates with my son. Please keep giving us more jewels like Mattie and his mother Jeni. Rebecca Corrine Schonwalder from Pennsylvania wrote to MY HERO about Mattie on December 16, 1998: I honor that a person like Mattie Stepanek would tell people about how he feels and he is only 6. I am 17 and I don't know how to tell people how I feel. On October 19, 2001, Dale-Anne Smith wrote about Mattie and his poetry: Thank you so much for your page about Mattie. I am a 29-year-old single mother of a beautiful little 2-year-old girl. In this last year, since separating from her father, and moving from the States back to my home in Canada, I have gone through many dark moments of fear and uncertainty. Reading Mattie's poems on your site really helped me see things in their true perspective. He is a true hero, an old soul, and a blessing to this planet. I wish I could hug that little man right now and breathe in his energy; he has touched my heart in a profound way. After seeing Mattie on the Oprah Winfrey Show, 81-year-old Elizabeth Haestie wrote: I "met" Mattie for the first time today on the Oprah show - I am an 81-year-old English lady, in good health, but sometimes feel somewhat depressed that I don't have a great many more years ahead of me in this life. But Mattie knocked all those feelings out of my mind altogether, and I don't think they will ever return. I am an "old soul" too, Mattie, as you are, and I shall remember you and your mother all the rest of my life. You are my hero, too. On 12 October 2003, Jim Hawkins wrote: Mattie was the opening speaker at the CHI World Congress in Alexandria in September and, of course, wowed everyone. He surprised me while I was taking photos by announcing the creation of a "Mattie Stepanek Champion Award" and presenting it to me. That brought a lump to my throat. The "Mattie Stepanek Champion Award" was created two years ago by Ann Armstrong-Dailey and CHI to honor Mattie's contributions to children everywhere. Read other comments from visitors to MY HERO about Mattie. Add your comments about Mattie and other inspirational heroes to the MY HERO Guestbook.

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When I grow up, I want to be a peacemaker. My biggest role model for this is Jimmy Carter, who has been a wonderful peanut farmer, politician, and peacemaker... I call him the 'perfect hero.

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La historia de Elmer nos enseña que las diferencias nos hacen especiales.

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Wang Yani has been painting since she was three years old.

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Ricky nos enseña una importante lección sobre ser honestos y responsables.

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Honesty Is The Best Policy | Moral Stories for Kids | Bedtime story| CoolToonz | Rhea & Ricky EP04

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Colaboradores de los proyectos Wikimedia

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Julio Verne - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Nunca dejes de intentarlo

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El punto - Peter H. Reynolds - Cuentos infantiles

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Kids learn about Mother Teresa's biography. A great humanitarian from India.

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Best Children's Picture Book on Optimism and Positive Thinking

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Hugo se hace muchas preguntas, hay muchas cosas que él quiere aprender. Mientras crece, se da cuenta que no siempre es sencillo tomar decisiones y diferencias qué está bien y que no lo está.

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La Gran Pregunta - Decisiones (Capítulos completos)

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This is a complete biography on Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, while her wealthy parents were on a tour of Europe. She was named after the city where she was born.

Early Life and Education

Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, England. Her father taught her Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, history, philosophy, and mathematics. Like most upper-class mothers at this time, Frances Nightingale expected her daughters to marry, look after a home, and maybe do some charity work. Florence thought there was more to life.

Aspirations to be a Nurse

When Florence was growing up, she helped take care of poor and sick people in the village near her family's estate. When she was 17, Florence felt God wanted her to be a nurse. In Victorian England, most nurses were uneducated and thought to be of questionable morals, Hospital conditions at that time were terrible. Doctors did operations with no anesthetic, and many people who went to hospitals died. Florence began to visit hospitals to see the conditionsunder which patients were cared for.

She Finally Gets Her Parents' Blessings

In 1851, her parents finally gave her permission to study nursing. She went to the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany for four months of training. When she came back to England, a rich friend asked Florence to run a London hospital for "invalid gentlewomen." There was no pay, so her father gave her an annual income of 500 Pounds (about $68,000 today). This meant she could live comfortably and pursue her career. She made lots of important changes at the hospital.

The Lady with the Lamp

In 1854, Russia invaded Turkey and the Crimean War began. Britain, France, and Turkey fought Russia. Sidney Herbert, the British war minister, asked Florence to supervise a team of 38 nurses at the military hospital in Scutari, Turkey. The hospital was overcrowded and filthy. Soldiers were not washed and lay on the floor because there were not enough beds. They had to eat moldy bread. There were no proper toilets. Drains were blocked. Rats and insects ran everywhere. The smell was terrible. Without good food, clean bandages, clean beds, and clean water, many died from diseases. Florence and her nurses greatly improved the conditions and many more soldiers survived. She earned the name "The Lady with the Lamp" because she would visit soldiers at night with a small lantern in her hand.

Return to England with Honors

When Florence returned to England, the Queen presented her with an engraved brooch that is known as the "Nightingale Jewel" and granted her $250,000 from the British government. Florence used the money to start the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. Trained nurses were sent to hospitals all over Britain. They introduced her ideas and trained others. Florence Nightingale never really recovered from the physical strain of the Crimean War. She almost never left home, and she stayed in bed much of the time, but she continued to fight for reform of military hospitals and medical care. She died in London, England, on August 13, 1910.

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This is a complete biography on Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, while her wealthy parents were on a tour of Europe. She was named after the city where she was born. Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, England.

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The Lion Inside - read aloud fun Storytime

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El optimista y el pesimista | Cuento con valores

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My hero is 12-year-old Anthony Leanna.

Anthony started a program when he was just 9 years old called Heavenly Hats. Anthony's program provides brand new hats to cancer patients who lose their hair due to cancer treatments. Since he has started this program, Anthony has donated more than 15,000 brand new hats to over 70 hospitals and clinics around the United States.

Anthony lives in Suamico, Wisconsin, about 10 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

He lives today and goes to Bay View Middle School.

Anthony is very important to me because he has a huge heart. He thinks about everyone else before himself. Anthony has made a difference in his school, community and country, and he makes us very proud to call him our son.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.

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My hero is 12-year-old Anthony Leanna. Anthony started a program when he was just 9 years old called Heavenly Hats. Anthony's program provides brand new hats to cancer patients who lose their hair due to cancer treatments. Since he has started this program, Anthony has donated more than 15,000 brand new hats to over 70 hospitals and clinics around the United States.

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The Runaway Wok (A Chinese New Year Folk Tale) READ ALOUD

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"Healthy food is a basic human right." - Robin Emmons

Robin Emmons became an organic farmer to fight hunger. It all started when she had a small garden in her backyard in which she grew a few vegetables. From there it grew into her own nonprofit organization, Vimeo Sow Much Good. Now, Robin and her two hundred volunteers grow fresh fruits, vegetables, and more for the hungry, low-income families in Charlotte, North Carolina. Robin Emmons shows her kindness, determined, hardworking attitude, and her positivity, doing everything she can towards helping the families in need. This makes Robin, a true hero.

Robin Emmons' heroic journey started when she was doing a kind favor for her formerly homeless brother. Robin demonstrated a simple act of kindness when she was looking out for her brother's health. "I had a small garden, so I thought, 'Well I'll just put in some extra rows,' I began making weekly deliveries." This shows her love and hope for her brother who was recently in jail. Robin's kindness grew when she quit her own job in 2008 and gave up her high-end lifestyle to help more than just her brother, but an entire city. Robin dedicates her time to helping all the families that need her. She is a true model of kindness, and she continues to prove it.

Robin Emmons may be a kind lady, but she is not afraid of hard work. She loves seeing satisfied customers buying her food, and strives to keep everyone happy. "I decided to rip up my whole backyard and make it all a garden," she said. Robin knows how her work affects people in such a positive manner. She started off with just herself but now has gathered over 200 volunteers to work with her on 9 acres of land. Together, Sow Much Good has grown more than 26,000 pounds of fresh, organic, chemical-free, fruits and vegetables for families who are striving for a more healthy lifestyle. Even though her former lifestyle consisted of designer suits and a high paycheck, Robin would much rather be in the dirt, changing lives, one family at a time.

Robin has a positive look on everything, helping each family as much as she can. She aims to make the 72,000 low-income families of Charlotte live healthy and affordable lifestyles. Not only does Robin sell her food at the lowest price possible, but she helps even more by offering cooking demonstrations and canning classes, and she distributes recipe cards. Whatever she can do to help, she does, knowing it is making the families happy, and most importantly, healthy. One of the family moms said, "I couldn't believe all the beautiful, fresh vegetables, and the price she was charging was phenomenal." This shows how her happy customers react to all of Robin's hard work.

Most people like the money and the the benefits for themselves of selling things, but that's what's different about Robin. Her reasons for spending all of her time on others is simply for their benefit. Robin felt like her "life was empty. I just felt like I needed to do more." Robin uses her gardening skills, kindness, hardworking attitude, and above and beyond mindset to do all she can to help her town of Charlotte. She aims to spread her organization nationwide someday, but at the moment, she is the greatest hero to all the families counting on her in North Carolina. Robin's life is rewarding in its benefits to others, showing her heroic qualities. Robin is the true definition of hero.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Related Links

CNN Heroes - Robin was CNN's 'Hero of the Year', with a featured story about her.

People Magazine - People Magazine did a story on Robin's amazing deeds.

Extra Info

Before Robin Emmons started gardening for the needy, she worked at an American bank for twenty years. Robin has never looked back on quitting her job though, because now she feels as if her life has meaning. She was also originally from Boston, but now lives with her husband in North Carolina.

Bibliography

Toner, Kathleen. "Creating an oasis in a Southern 'food desert'." [Online] Available www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/cnn-heroes-top-10-robin-emmons/.

Ballard, Michaele. "Robin Emmons: Why I Quit My Bank Job to Feed North Carolina's Hungry." [Online] Available http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20615310,00.html.

Emmons, Robin. "Sow Much Good." [Online] Available http://www.sowmuchgood.org.

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"Healthy food is a basic human right." - Robin Emmons Robin Emmons became an organic farmer to fight hunger. It all started when she had a small garden in her backyard in which she grew a few vegetables. From there it grew into her own nonprofit organization, Vimeo Sow Much Good.

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Sleepy Time Stories Reads "The Lumberjack's Beard" By: Duncan Beedie

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Vivienne Harr was on to something when she told people to simply pay what was in their hearts. It's not exactly a common business practice, but then Vivienne was only eight when she suggested the strategy. Turns out, she's one tenacious saleswoman with some strong ideas.

You see, Vivienne made a lemonade stand. This, in and of itself, isn't that different from what children across the country do every summer. But what is different is that Vivienne wanted to raise money to free children in slavery. She called it Make A Stand lemonade.

"I just thought it was wrong and I had to help," she says simply.

Her goal? $100,000. Yes, that's not a typo. Vivienne wanted to raise $100,000 to free 500 child slaves. What's more, she was willing to stick with it - every day, rain or shine - until she made good on that promise.

She was motivated by a photograph taken by Lisa Kristine, a San Francisco-based photographer whose image of two young brothers from the Himalayas had made a big impression upon Vivienne. It was two boys holding hands, brothers about her age, forced to carry granite boulders from a strap around their heads. Kristine took the pictures to move others into action. And boy, was Vivienne activated.

"I thought slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln," Vivienne says on the Make a Stand website. "I was wrong about that. I learned that slavery is everywhere and even here in America. I wanted to do something, because compassion is not compassion without action."

Since the only way she knew to make money was selling lemonade, she did that. "I decided to do my lemonade stand every day rain or shine for a whole year to raise money to help these kids," she says. "It was a gigantic, audacious goal," says her father Eric.

So on Monday June 25th, 2012, she took her home-made stand (she had help from her folks) and positioned it in a public park in her hometown of Fairfax, California. She brought people to tears with her determination. Vivienne raised quite a bit of money on that first day. And the next. One week turned into one month.

When Vivienne decided that her lemonade should be "free because every child should be free," the value of each lovingly made cup of organic lemonade sweetened with agave nectar and offered with optional mint and raspberries soared from an average of $2 to $18. One cup brought in $1,000.

Her father, a social media professional, helped spread her story with a Twitter feed. When New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted about Vivienne's lemon-aid on day #52, more than $18,000 rolled in in just 2 days alone. By day #56, she had made $30,000. Media from all around the U.S. and as far away as Hong Kong to Brazil, have covered her story.

Every day Vivienne was at her stand, even after summer ended. She continued to open her stand, every day changing the chalk number on the front of her stand to show just how many days she had been at it. On the 173rd day, she set up her stand in Times Square at the request of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Not surprisingly, that's where she surpassed her goal and was able to write a check for $101,320 (in truth, her parents had to sign it) to Not For Sale, a California non-profit focused on ending child slave labor.

Her parents were so proud. And probably a bit ready to move on. "My parents said, 'Honey, you did it! You're done!'' says Vivienne. "I said, 'Is child slavery done?' They said 'No.' I said, 'Then I'm not done."

Indeed, Vivienne continued to pulp organic lemons and set up her lemonade stand every day for a full 365 days. On the 366th, Make a Stand Lemon-aid in a bottle was introduced, and the street-side lemonade stand moved online. It's now also sold at 150+ grocery stores. The "pay what's in your heart" model is still used.

Her father quit his job to work full-time on realizing Vivienne's dream of ending slavery in her lifetime one bottle of lemonade at a time.

Vivienne's new 501(c)3, The Make a Stand Foundation, seeks to deliver on Vivienne's vision: "I want to help free the 18 million children in slavery and keep them safe. Free and safe." She has become a leading global voice in the fight against child slavery.

With 30 million slaves worldwide - and half of them children - there is plenty of work to be done. Make A Stand lemonade donates 5% of its sales to Free The Slaves, Nepal Youth Foundation, UNICEF, the International Programme On the Elimination of Child Labor, and Gems: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for nine-year-old Vivienne Harr, one picture has been worth all the effort. And for countless children enslaved around the world, this one girl is priceless.

"If done right, [Make a Stand] could not just raise money to end child slavery, but perhaps create a role model for nonprofits and all types of businesses." ~ The New York Times

Twitter honored Vivienne by allowing her to ring the bell at their IPO on November 7 th, 2013.They chose her because she is "a symbol of the power of one person - and how Twitter can be used to change the world."

When Sue Glader asked Vivienne, "Who is your hero?" Vivienne replied:

"My hero?
it is the child in slavery who doesn't give up hope.
think about this.
you have to work all day,
and you're hurt,
and you can't leave.
but you hold on to hope
and you keep going.
that's a hero to me.
i hope these kids can hold on to hope,
because we're coming.
we're coming."
-- Vivienne Harr

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Vivienne Harr was on to something when she told people to simply pay what was in their hearts. It's not exactly a common business practice, but then Vivienne was only eight when she suggested the strategy. Turns out, she's one tenacious saleswoman with some strong ideas. You see, Vivienne made a lemonade stand.

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Ryan Hreljac (born 30 May 1991) is a Canadian activist, who established the Ryan's Well Foundation to bring water to people in developing countries. He has received numerous awards for his work, and he was the youngest person ever to be bestowed with the Order of Ontario

Hreljac is the son of Susan and Mark Hreljac of Kemptville, Ontario. He has three brothers: Keegan, Jordan and Jimmy. Jimmy Akana was Hreljac's first pen pal from Uganda. Jimmy's parents disappeared during the country's civil war and he was raised by an aunt. He used to get up at midnight so that he could fetch water for his aunt before school. The two boys met during Hreljac's visit in 2000 to the Angolo Primary School in Uganda, where the first well that he funded was drilled. Jimmy was later abducted by a rebel group, Lord's Resistance Army, and then escaped to the home of an aid worker. The Hreljac family paid for his schooling for a couple of years and then brought him to Canada. Ryan's family adopted Jimmy, and he became a Canadian citizen in 2007.

The brothers both graduated from high school in June 2000. After his graduation from St. Michael's Catholic High School in Kemptville, Ontario, Hreljac graduated in 2013 from University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia; his field of study was International Development and Political Science.[citation needed ] Hreljac was employed by Youth Ottawa, a nongovernmental organization after he graduated in 2013. About 20 people sit on the Ottawa Youth Engagement Committee to represent the interests of young people in the capital city's politics.

While six years old, Hreljac learned in school that many people in Africa have a very hard time getting access to clean water. Hreljac began raising money for those affected by the global water crisis by doing household chores, which netted him $70 over a four-month period. Doing more chores and fund-raising, within twelve months he had raised $2,000, which was the cost to build a well, according to WaterCan, a non-profit organization that provides clean water to poor countries. In January 1999, he sent the money to WaterCan, who had the first well drilled in northern Uganda alongside the Angolo Public School. It was built by the Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief that year.

In two years, he raised $61,000. The Canadian International Development Agency heard of Hreljac's efforts and matched $2 for every dollar that he raised. He told his story on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Hreljac founded Ryan's Well Foundation, a registered Canadian charity, in 2001 to build in Africa and educate children about sanitation and safe water. The foundation has three ways to educate school children about water issues, the Youth in Action program, the Getting Involved program and the School Challenge program.[citation needed ]

The foundation's objective has expanded to build wells anywhere in the world. Millions of dollars for water and sanitation projects in Africa, Central America, and South Asia. The foundation has brought clean water to more than 892,725 people in 16 developing countries, through 1,166 water and sanitation projects. It has partners in twelve countries, including Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Togo and Haiti to identify the communities most in need of a water or sanitation project. It has worked with Rotary Clubs on well projects. By 2015, it completed 900 projects benefiting 824,038 people. Some of the projects were for rain harvesting tanks in areas-like Guatemala, Haiti, and India-where that was the optimal solution for safe water. The 1,000th well was dug in the fall of 2015 in northern Uganda, in a district neighboring the first well. Supporters of the foundation include Matt Damon, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Goodall, and Prince Charles.

Hreljac became Assistant Project Manager at the foundation in January 2015, in preparation for a June 2015 opening for Project Manager. His on-the-job training included trips to Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Uganda to train locals how to maintain their wells. He has also traveled extensively-including Brazil, Mexico, Qatar, and Argentina-to speak about the foundation.

Hreljac received the World of Children Awards in 2003, and a second time at the Montage Beverly Hills in April 2016 as an alumni winner. In 2004, he was named a Paul Harris Fellow. Hreljac was made a Lifesaver hero by The My Hero Project by late 2010. He is the youngest person ever to receive the Order of Ontario. He has also been awarded the Canadian Meritorious Service Medal, the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award, The Wolf Award, and Planet Africa's Nelson Mandela Humanitarian Award.

Ryan's Well, directed by Lalita Krishna in 2001, tells the story of the first well.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars, a documentary in 2008 in which Hreljac appears.

Get Involved!, a television show in which Hreljac appears in 2008.

Return to Ryan's Well, a 2015 documentary, tells the story of Ryan Hreljac's return to his first well site at Angolo Primary School in Uganda and how the well changed the lives of the people in the area. The 27-minute film was also directed by Krishna. It was selected for the Planet in Focus Film Festival, one of the most significant environmental festivals that takes place in North America, that occurred in Toronto in October 2015.

The Water Princess is a book about a girl, Gie Gie, who walks with her mother each day to collect water. It is based upon the early life of Georgie Badiel, a model, who grew up in Burkina Faso. She established a foundation that partners with Ryan's Well Foundation to bring clean water to African communities.

Blue Gold. "The Action Plan: Emergency Aid".

Ellis, Deborah (November 11, 2016). "How Do You Explain the Refugee Crisis to Children? New Picture Books Can Help". The New York Times.

Jewell, Wendy (September 30, 2015). "Ryan Hreljac". The My Hero Project.

Ottawa Citizen (March 20, 2016). "The UpBeat: Ryan's Well Foundation founder honoured by youth organization". Ottawa Citizen.

Schnurr, Joanne (May 8, 2014). "Return to Ryan's Well 15 years later".

Smith, Patrick (September 25, 2015). "The UpBeat: Ryan's Well Foundation reaches milestone in clean water drive". Ottawa Citizen.

Westendorp, Jennifer (October 9, 2015a). 'Return to Ryan's Well' premieres in Kemptville. Inside Ottawa Valley.

Westendorp, Jennifer (January 22, 2015b). Ryan Hreljac takes on new role at Ryan's Well Foundation. Inside Ottawa Valley.

Woods, Tiffany (April 2008). The Rotarian. Rotary International. p. 29. ISSN 0035-838X.

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Ryan Hreljac (born 30 May 1991) is a Canadian activist, who established the Ryan's Well Foundation to bring water to people in developing countries. He has received numerous awards for his work, and he was the youngest person ever to be bestowed with the Order of Ontario Hreljac is the son of Susan and Mark Hreljac of Kemptville, Ontario.

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Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho was homeless in Brazil, for nearly 35 years. In April 2011, he was befriended by a young woman named Shalla Monteiro. Impressed by his poetry she created a Facebook Page to feature Raimundo's writing. Neither could have expected what happened next.

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Sophie Delezio was an ambassador for 2008 World Youth Day.

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Kids learn about the biography of Rosa Parks, civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat on the bus.

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The Invisible Boy, Written by Trudy Ludwig Illustrated by Patrice Barton

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Be Kind | A Children's Story about things that matter

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Kids learn about the biography of Helen Keller, blind and deaf woman who learned to read, write, and talk.

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by Brynn from Connecticut

Razia Jan, founder of the Zabuli Education Center, says while her life in America was fulfilling and rich, her dream was "to do something for Afghanistan and educate the girls." Razia provides a free education to 34 area girls in a two story, 14 room building in Deh' Subz, Afghanistan and is a true example of a hero! Although she has many everyday ordeals, she is not afraid of them and continues to do exemplary work to help girls.

Razia Jan, 68, was born in the 1940's in Afghanistan. She traveled to the United States to attend college in 1970. Much of her family fled Afghanistan or were killed during the Russian Invasion. She became an American citizen in 1990. Razia opened a tailoring business and raised a son, but was always involved in philanthropic efforts in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Razia was personally affected by September 11. She turned her store into a workshop and launched a campaign to help victims, first responders, U.S. soldiers, and Afghan children. Razia and volunteers shipped care packages to U.S. soldiers and more than 30,000 boxes of shoes for soldiers to give to Afghan children. But, on a visit to her homeland in 2002, Razia realized that the women and girls were still suffering from years of Taliban control. Razia still had a dream to educate the girls and it became even clearer when she saw that the women had no rights or a say in anything.

In 2005, Razia began raising funds through her Massachusetts-based nonprofit, Razia's Ray of Hope. When she visited Afghanistan, Razia was able to negotiate with the Ministry of Education to secure land for her school. At first when the Zabuli Education Center first opened, most of the men discouraged the ideas of girls going to school. But now, Razia says that the men are proud of the girls.

Razia Jan is a hero because while every day is a struggle, she continues to share her passion for learning with the girls of her school and doesn't stop even if she is threatened. Everyday, security guards have to check the doors and windows and test the water to make sure it is not poisonous. Razia has gotten threats and a school on the other side of town has even experienced grenades thrown at them. These challenges do not make Razia back down. In fact, they just encourage her even more to continue her dream of providing an education for girls.

Razia is both a hero and a role model because she provides a free education to girls in Afghanistan. The Zabuli Education Center teaches math, science, religion and three languages: English, Farsi and Pashto. At first, the girls couldn't write their names but now they can all read and write. A hero isn't just superhuman or a philanthropist everyone knows about. Heroes are regular people, just like you and me who are choosing to devote their lives to the well being of others. Razia is an example of an ordinary woman doing extraordinary things.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Related Links

Razia's Ray of Hope - is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and children in Afghanistan through community-based education.

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Razia Jan, founder of the Zabuli Education Center, says while her life in America was fulfilling and rich, her dream was "to do something for Afghanistan and educate the girls." Razia provides a free education to 34 area girls in a two story, 14 room building in Deh' Subz, Afghanistan and is a true example of a hero!

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Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted, nonviolent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the United States.

King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his " I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who frequently responded violently. King was jailed several times. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, spied on his personal life, and secretly recorded him. In 1964, the FBI mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.

On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by national mourning, as well as anger leading to riots in many U.S. cities. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and King County in Washington State was rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Early life and education

King was born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children to Michael King and Alberta King (née Williams). King had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel "A.D." King. Alberta's father, Adam Daniel Williams, was a minister in rural Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1893, and became pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the following year. Williams married Jennie Celeste Parks. King, Sr. was born to sharecroppers, James Albert and Delia King of Stockbridge, Georgia, and was of African- Irish descent. In his adolescent years, King Sr. left his parents' farm and walked to Atlanta where he attained a high school education, and enrolled in Morehouse College to study for entry to the ministry. King Sr. and Alberta began dating in 1920, and married on November 25, 1926. Until Jennie's death in 1941, they lived together on the second floor of Alberta's parents' two-story Victorian house, where King was born.

Shortly after marrying Alberta, King Sr. became assistant pastor of the Ebenezer church. Senior pastor Williams died in the spring of 1931 and that fall, King Sr. took the role, where he would in time raise the attendance from six hundred to several thousand. In 1934, the church sent King Sr. on a multinational trip, including to Berlin for the meeting of the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). He also visited sites in Germany associated with the Reformation leader, Martin Luther. While there, King Sr. and the BWA delegates witnessed the rise of Nazism. In reaction, the BWA issued a resolution stating, "This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world." On returning home in August 1934, King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King and his five-year-old son's name to Martin Luther King Jr.

Early childhood

At his childhood home, King and his two siblings would read aloud the Bible as instructed by their father. After dinners there, King's grandmother Jennie, whom he affectionately referred to as "Mama", would tell lively stories from the Bible to her grandchildren. King's father would regularly use whippings to discipline his children. At times, King Sr. would also have his children whip each other. King's father later remarked, "[King] was the most peculiar child whenever you whipped him. He'd stand there, and the tears would run down, and he'd never cry." Once when King witnessed his brother A.D. emotionally upset his sister Christine, he took a telephone and knocked out A.D. with it. When he and his brother were playing at their home, A.D. slid from a banister and hit into their grandmother, Jennie, causing her to fall unresponsive. King, believing her dead, blamed himself and attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window. Upon hearing that his grandmother was alive, King rose and left the ground where he had fallen.

King became friends with a white boy whose father owned a business across the street from his family's home. In September 1935, when the boys were about six years old, they started school. King had to attend a school for black children, Yonge Street Elementary School, while his close playmate went to a separate school for white children only. Soon afterwards, the parents of the white boy stopped allowing King to play with their son, stating to him "we are white, and you are colored". When King relayed the happenings to his parents, they had a long discussion with him about the history of slavery and racism in America. Upon learning of the hatred, violence and oppression that black people had faced in the U.S., King would later state that he was "determined to hate every white person". His parents instructed him that it was his Christian duty to love everyone.

King witnessed his father stand up against segregation and various forms of discrimination. Once, when stopped by a police officer who referred to King Sr. as "boy", King's father responded sharply that King was a boy but he was a man. When King's father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back. King's father refused, stating "we'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all", before taking King and leaving the store. He told King afterward, "I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it." In 1936, King's father led hundreds of African Americans in a civil rights march to the city hall in Atlanta, to protest voting rights discrimination. King later remarked that King Sr. was "a real father" to him.

King memorized and sang hymns, and stated verses from the Bible, by the time he was five years old. Over the next year, he began to go to church events with his mother and sing hymns while she played piano. His favorite hymn to sing was "I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus"; he moved attendees with his singing. King later became a member of the junior choir in his church. King enjoyed opera, and played the piano. As he grew up, King garnered a large vocabulary from reading dictionaries and consistently used his expanding lexicon. He got into physical altercations with boys in his neighborhood, but oftentimes used his knowledge of words to stymie fights. King showed a lack of interest in grammar and spelling, a trait that he carried throughout his life. In 1939, King sang as a member of his church choir in slave costume, for the all-white audience at the Atlanta premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. In September 1940, at the age of 11, King was enrolled at the Atlanta University Laboratory School for the seventh grade. While there, King took violin and piano lessons, and showed keen interest in his history and English classes.

On May 18, 1941, when King had sneaked away from studying at home to watch a parade, King was informed that something had happened to his maternal grandmother. Upon returning home, he found out that she had suffered a heart attack and died while being transported to a hospital. He took the death very hard and believed that his deception of going to see the parade may have been responsible for God taking her. King jumped out of a second-story window at his home, but again survived an attempt to kill himself. His father instructed him in his bedroom that King should not blame himself for her death, and that she had been called home to God as part of God's plan that could not be changed. King struggled with this, and could not fully believe that his parents knew where his grandmother had gone. Shortly thereafter, King's father decided to move the family to a two-story brick home on a hill that overlooked downtown Atlanta.

Adolescence

In his adolescent years, he initially felt resentment against whites due to the "racial humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure in the segregated South. In 1942, when King was 13 years old, he became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. That year, King skipped the ninth grade and was enrolled in Booker T. Washington High School, where he maintained a B-plus average. The high school was the only one in the city for African-American students. It had been formed after local black leaders, including King's grandfather (Williams), urged the city government of Atlanta to create it.

While King was brought up in a Baptist home, King grew skeptical of some of Christianity's claims as he entered adolescence. He began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father's church. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school. King said that he found himself unable to identify with the emotional displays and gestures from congregants frequent at his church, and doubted if he would ever attain personal satisfaction from religion. He later stated of this point in his life, "doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly."

In high school, King became known for his public-speaking ability, with a voice that had grown into an orotund baritone. He proceeded to join the school's debate team. King continued to be most drawn to history and English, and chose English and sociology to be his main subjects while at the school. King maintained an abundant vocabulary. But, he relied on his sister, Christine, to help him with his spelling, while King assisted her with math. They studied in this manner routinely until Christine's graduation from high school. King also developed an interest in fashion, commonly adorning himself in well polished patent leather shoes and tweed suits, which gained him the nickname "Tweed" or "Tweedie" among his friends. He further grew a liking for flirting with girls and dancing. His brother A. D. later remarked, "He kept flitting from chick to chick, and I decided I couldn't keep up with him. Especially since he was crazy about dances, and just about the best jitterbug in town."

On April 13, 1944, in his junior year, King gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest, sponsored by the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World in Dublin, Georgia. In his speech he stated, "black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar." King was selected as the winner of the contest. On the ride home to Atlanta by bus, he and his teacher were ordered by the driver to stand so that white passengers could sit down. The driver of the bus called King a "black son-of-a-bitch". King initially refused but complied after his teacher told him that he would be breaking the law if he did not follow the directions of the driver. As all the seats were occupied, he and his teacher were forced to stand on the rest of the drive back to Atlanta. Later King wrote of the incident, saying "That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life."

Morehouse College

During King's junior year in high school, Morehouse College-an all-male historically black college that King's father and maternal grandfather had attended-began accepting high school juniors who passed the school's entrance examination. As World War II was underway many black college students had been enlisted in the war, decreasing the numbers of students at Morehouse College. So, the university aimed to increase their student numbers by allowing juniors to apply. In 1944, at the age of 15, King passed the entrance examination and was enrolled at the university for the school season that autumn.

In the summer before King started his freshman year at Morehouse, he boarded a train with his friend-Emmett "Weasel" Proctor-and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury, Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco (a cigar business). This was King's first trip outside of the segregated south into the integrated north. In a June 1944 letter to his father King wrote about the differences that struck him between the two parts of the country, "On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to." The students worked at the farm to be able to provide for their educational costs at Morehouse College, as the farm had partnered with the college to allot their salaries towards the university's tuition, housing, and other fees. On weekdays King and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am till at least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100 °F, to earn roughly USD$4 per day. On Friday evenings, King and the other students visited downtown Simsbury to get milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford, Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop and eat in restaurants. On each Sunday they would go to Hartford to attend church services, at a church filled with white congregants. King wrote to his parents about the lack of segregation in Connecticut, relaying how he was amazed they could go to "one of the finest restaurants in Hartford" and that "Negroes and whites go to the same church".

He played freshman football there. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. Throughout his time in college, King studied under the mentorship of its president, Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, who he would later credit with being his "spiritual mentor". King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity". His "inner urge" had begun developing, and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a "rational" minister with sermons that were "a respectful force for ideas, even social protest." King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.

Religious education, ministry, marriage and family

Crozer Theological Seminary

King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. King's father fully supported his decision to continue his education and made arrangements for King to work with prominent Crozer alum, J. Pius Barbour, a family friend who pastored at Calvary Baptist Church in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania. King became known as one of the "Sons of Calvary", an honor he shared with William Augustus Jones Jr. and Samuel D. Proctor who both went on to become well-known preachers in the black church.

King once reproved another student for keeping beer in his room, saying they had shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race". For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". In his third year at Crozer, King became romantically involved with the white daughter of an immigrant German woman who worked as a cook in the cafeteria. The woman had been involved with a professor prior to her relationship with King. King planned to marry her, but friends advised against it, saying that an interracial marriage would provoke animosity from both blacks and whites, potentially damaging his chances of ever pastoring a church in the South. King tearfully told a friend that he could not endure his mother's pain over the marriage and broke the relationship off six months later. He continued to have lingering feelings toward the woman he left; one friend was quoted as saying, "He never recovered." King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity (B.Div.) degree in 1951. He applied to the University of Edinburgh to do his doctorate in the School of Divinity. An offer was made by Edinburgh but he chose Boston instead.

Boston University

In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University. While pursuing doctoral studies, King worked as an assistant minister at Boston's historic Twelfth Baptist Church with William Hunter Hester. Hester was an old friend of King's father and was an important influence on King. In Boston, King befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury (and younger brother of jazz drummer Roy Haynes). The young men often held bull sessions in their various apartments, discussing theology, sermon style, and social issues.

At the age of 25 in 1954, King was called as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King received his PhD degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation (initially supervised by Edgar S. Brightman and, upon the latter's death, by Lotan Harold DeWolf) titled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.

An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. However, "[d]espite its finding, the committee said that 'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree,' an action that the panel said would serve no purpose." The committee found that the dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." A letter is now attached to the copy of King's dissertation held in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources. Significant debate exists on how to interpret King's plagiarism.

Marriage and family

While studying at Boston University, he asked a friend from Atlanta named Mary Powell, who was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, if she knew any nice Southern girls. Powell asked fellow student Coretta Scott if she was interested in meeting a Southern friend studying divinity. Scott was not interested in dating preachers but eventually agreed to allow Martin to telephone her based on Powell's description and vouching. On their first phone call, King told Scott "I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," to which she replied, "You haven't even met me." They went out for dates in his green Chevy. After the second date, King was certain Scott possessed the qualities he sought in a wife. She had been an activist at Antioch as an undergraduate student.

King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children: Yolanda King (1955-2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963). During their marriage, King limited Coretta's role in the civil rights movement, expecting her to be a housewife and mother.

In December 1959, after being based in Montgomery for five years, King announced his return to Atlanta at the request of the SCLC. In Atlanta, King served until his death as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and helped expand the Civil Rights Movement across the South.

Activism and organizational leadership

Montgomery bus boycott, 1955

In March 1955, Claudette Colvin-a fifteen-year-old black schoolgirl in Montgomery-refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the Southern United States that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; E. D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue because the incident involved a minor.

The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested for traveling 30 mph in a 25 mph zone and jailed during this campaign, which overnight drew the attention of national media, and greatly increased King's public stature. The controversy ended when the United States District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that prohibited racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. Blacks resumed riding the buses again, and were able to sit in the front with full legal authorization.

King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform. The group was inspired by the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham, who befriended King, as well as the national organizing of the group In Friendship, founded by King allies Stanley Levison and Ella Baker. King led the SCLC until his death. The SCLC's 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom was the first time King addressed a national audience. Other civil rights leaders involved in the SCLC with King included: James Bevel, Allen Johnson, Curtis W. Harris, Walter E. Fauntroy, C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, The Freedom Singers, Cleveland Robinson, Randolph Blackwell, Annie Bell Robinson Devine, Charles Kenzie Steele, Alfred Daniel Williams King, Benjamin Hooks, Aaron Henry and Bayard Rustin.

The Gandhi Society

Harry Wachtel joined King's legal advisor Clarence B. Jones in defending four ministers of the SCLC in the libel case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan; the case was litigated about the newspaper advertisement " Heed Their Rising Voices". Wachtel founded a tax-exempt fund to cover the suit's expenses and assist the nonviolent civil rights movement through a more effective means of fundraising. This organization was named the "Gandhi Society for Human Rights". King served as honorary president for the group. He was displeased with the pace that President Kennedy was using to address the issue of segregation. In 1962, King and the Gandhi Society produced a document that called on the President to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln and issue an executive order to deliver a blow for civil rights as a kind of Second Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy did not execute the order.

The FBI was under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy when it began tapping King's telephone line in the fall of 1963. Kennedy was concerned that public allegations of communists in the SCLC would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives. He warned King to discontinue these associations and later felt compelled to issue the written directive that authorized the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the civil rights movement and investigated the allegations of communist infiltration. When no evidence emerged to support this, the FBI used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years, as part of its COINTELPRO program, in attempts to force King out of his leadership position

King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.

Survived knife attack, 1958

On September 20, 1958, King was signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom in Blumstein's department store in Harlem when he narrowly escaped death. Izola Curry-a mentally ill black woman who thought that King was conspiring against her with communists-stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, which nearly impinged on the aorta. King received first aid by police officers Al Howard and Philip Romano. King underwent emergency surgery with three doctors: Aubre de Lambert Maynard, Emil Naclerio and John W. V. Cordice; he remained hospitalized for several weeks. Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Atlanta sit-ins, prison sentence, and the 1960 elections

Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver expressed open hostility towards King's return to his hometown in late 1959. He claimed that "wherever M. L. King Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes", and vowed to keep King under surveillance. On May 4, 1960, several months after his return, King drove writer Lillian Smith to Emory University when police stopped them. King was cited for "driving without a license" because he had not yet been issued a Georgia license. King's Alabama license was still valid, and Georgia law did not mandate any time limit for issuing a local license. King paid a fine but was unaware that his lawyer agreed to a plea deal that also included a probationary sentence.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Student Movement had been acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces in the city, organizing the Atlanta sit-ins from March 1960 onwards. In August the movement asked King to participate in a mass October sit-in, timed to highlight how 1960's Presidential election campaign had ignored civil rights. The coordinated day of action took place on October 19. King participated in a sit-in at the restaurant inside Rich's, Atlanta's largest department store, and was among the many arrested that day. The authorities released everyone over the next few days, except for King. Invoking his probationary plea deal, judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentenced King on October 25 to four months of hard labor. Before dawn the next day, King was taken from his county jail cell and transported to Georgia State Prison.

The arrest and harsh sentence drew nationwide attention. Many feared for King's safety, as he started a prison sentence with people convicted of violent crimes, many of them White and hostile to his activism. Both Presidential candidates were asked to weigh in, at a time when both parties were courting the support of Southern Whites and their political leadership including Governor Vandiver. Nixon, with whom King had a closer relationship before, declined to make a statement despite a personal visit from Jackie Robinson requesting his intervention. Nixon's opponent John F. Kennedy called the governor (a Democrat) directly, enlisted his brother Robert to exert more pressure on state authorities, and also, at the personal request of Sargent Shriver, made a phone call to King's wife to express his sympathy and offer his help. The pressure from Kennedy and others proved effective, and King was released two days later. King's father decided to openly endorse Kennedy's candidacy for the November 8 election which he narrowly won.

Albany Movement, 1961

King returned in July 1962 and was given the option of forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine (equivalent to $1,600 in 2021); he chose jail. Three days into his sentence, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett discreetly arranged for King's fine to be paid and ordered his release. "We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools ... ejected from churches ... and thrown into jail ... But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail." It was later acknowledged by the King Center that Billy Graham was the one who bailed King out of jail during this time.

Birmingham campaign, 1963

In April 1963, the SCLC began a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust.

King's intent was to provoke mass arrests and "create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation." The campaign's early volunteers did not succeed in shutting down the city, or in drawing media attention to the police's actions. Over the concerns of an uncertain King, SCLC strategist James Bevel changed the course of the campaign by recruiting children and young adults to join in the demonstrations. called this strategy a Children's Crusade.

King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign-his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous " Letter from Birmingham Jail" that responds to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change. The letter has been described as "one of the most important historical documents penned by a modern political prisoner". King argues that the crisis of racism is too urgent, and the current system too entrenched: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." He points out that the Boston Tea Party, a celebrated act of rebellion in the American colonies, was illegal civil disobedience, and that, conversely, "everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'." Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged for $160,000 to bail out King and his fellow protestors.

March on Washington, 1963

King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the " Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. The other leaders and organizations comprising the Big Six were Roy Wilkins from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young, National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; John Lewis, SNCC; and James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which King agreed to do. However, he did collaborate in the 1963 March on Washington, for which Rustin was the primary logistical and strategic organizer. For King, this role was another which courted controversy, since he was one of the key figures who acceded to the wishes of United States President John F. Kennedy in changing the focus of the march.

Kennedy initially opposed the march outright, because he was concerned it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, the organizers were firm that the march would proceed. With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. President Kennedy was concerned the turnout would be less than 100,000. Therefore, he enlisted the aid of additional church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, to help mobilize demonstrators for the cause.

The march made specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public schools; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers (equivalent to $18 in 2021); and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. Despite tensions, the march was a resounding success. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.'s history.

I Have a Dream

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

St. Augustine, Florida, 1964

In March 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with Robert Hayling's then-controversial movement in St. Augustine, Florida. Hayling's group had been affiliated with the NAACP but was forced out of the organization for advocating armed self-defense alongside nonviolent tactics. However, the pacifist SCLC accepted them. King and the SCLC worked to bring white Northern activists to St. Augustine, including a delegation of rabbis and the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, all of whom were arrested. During June, the movement marched nightly through the city, "often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention." Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and jailed. During this movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

Biddeford, Maine, 1964

On May 7, 1964, King spoke at Saint Francis College's "The Negro and the Quest for Identity", in Biddeford, Maine. This was a symposium that brought many civil rights leaders together such as Dorothy Day and Roy Wilkins. King spoke about how "We must get rid of the idea of superior and inferior races," through nonviolent tactics.

New York City, 1964

On February 6, 1964, King delivered the inaugural speech of a lecture series initiated at the New School called "The American Race Crisis". In August 2013, almost 50 years later, the school discovered an audiotape with 15 minutes of a question-and-answer session that followed King's address. In these remarks, King referred to a conversation he had recently had with Jawaharlal Nehru in which he compared the sad condition of many African Americans to that of India's untouchables. The original speech recording is part of a collection of audiotapes in Amherst College's Archives & Special Collections in 1989. Dr. King's speech had been rebroadcast on Amherst's student-run radio station, WAMF (now WAMH). The tape was digitized in the fall of 2015 and shared with The New School Archives. In his March 18, 1964, interview by Robert Penn Warren, King compared his activism to his father's, citing his training in non-violence as a key difference. He also discusses the next phase of the civil rights movement and integration.

Scripto strike in Atlanta, 1964

Starting in November 1964, King supported a labor strike led by several hundred workers at the Scripto factory in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta, just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist. Many of the strikers were also congregants of his church, and the strike was supported by other civil rights leaders in the city. King helped elevate the labor dispute from a local to nationally-known event and led the SCLC to organize a nationwide boycott of Scripto products. However, as the strike stretched into December, King, who was wanting to focus more on a civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, began to negotiate in secret with Scripto's president Carl Singer and eventually brokered a deal where the SCLC would call off their boycott in exchange for the company giving the striking employees their Christmas bonuses. King's involvement in the strike ended on December 24 and a contract between the company and union was signed on January 9 of the following year.

Selma voting rights movement and "Bloody Sunday", 1965

In December 1964, King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, where the SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months. A local judge issued an injunction that barred any gathering of three or more people affiliated with the SNCC, SCLC, DCVL, or any of 41 named civil rights leaders. This injunction temporarily halted civil rights activity until King defied it by speaking at Brown Chapel on January 2, 1965. During the 1965 march to Montgomery, Alabama, violence by state police and others against the peaceful marchers resulted in much publicity, which made racism in Alabama visible nationwide.

On March 5, King met with officials in the Johnson Administration to request an injunction against any prosecution of the demonstrators. He did not attend the march due to church duties, but he later wrote, "If I had any idea that the state troopers would use the kind of brutality they did, I would have felt compelled to give up my church duties altogether to lead the line." Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage.

King next attempted to organize a march for March 9. The SCLC petitioned for an injunction in federal court against the State of Alabama; this was denied and the judge issued an order blocking the march until after a hearing. Nonetheless, King led marchers on March 9 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, then held a short prayer session before turning the marchers around and asking them to disperse so as not to violate the court order. The unexpected ending of this second march aroused the surprise and anger of many within the local movement. Meanwhile, on March 11 King cried at the news of Johnson supporting a voting rights bill on television in Marie Foster's living room. The march finally went ahead fully on March 25, 1965. At the conclusion of the march on the steps of the state capitol, King delivered a speech that became known as " How Long, Not Long". In it, King stated that equal rights for African Americans could not be far away, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" and "you shall reap what you sow".

Chicago open housing movement, 1966

The SCLC formed a coalition with CCCO, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, an organization founded by Albert Raby, and the combined organizations' efforts were fostered under the aegis of the Chicago Freedom Movement. During that spring, several white couple/black couple tests of real estate offices uncovered racial steering: discriminatory processing of housing requests by couples who were exact matches in income, background, number of children, and other attributes. Several larger marches were planned and executed: in Bogan, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, Evergreen Park (a suburb southwest of Chicago), Gage Park, Marquette Park, and others.

King later stated and Abernathy wrote that the movement received a worse reception in Chicago than in the South. Marches, especially the one through Marquette Park on August 5, 1966, were met by thrown bottles and screaming throngs. Rioting seemed very possible. King's beliefs militated against his staging a violent event, and he negotiated an agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley to cancel a march in order to avoid the violence that he feared would result. King was hit by a brick during one march, but continued to lead marches in the face of personal danger.

A 1967 CIA document declassified in 2017 downplayed King's role in the "black militant situation" in Chicago, with a source stating that King "sought at least constructive, positive projects."

Opposition to the Vietnam War

King was long opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War, but at first avoided the topic in public speeches in order to avoid the interference with civil rights goals that criticism of President Johnson's policies might have created. At the urging of SCLC's former Director of Direct Action and now the head of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, James Bevel, and inspired by the outspokenness of Muhammad Ali, King eventually agreed to publicly oppose the war as opposition was growing among the American public.

During an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church-exactly one year before his death-King delivered a speech titled " Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". He connected the war with economic injustice, arguing that the country needed serious moral change:

King opposed the Vietnam War because it took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare at home. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He stated that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands", and accused the U.S. of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children". King also criticized American opposition to North Vietnam's land reforms.

King's opposition cost him significant support among white allies, including President Johnson, Billy Graham, union leaders and powerful publishers. "The press is being stacked against me", King said, complaining of what he described as a double standard that applauded his nonviolence at home, but deplored it when applied "toward little brown Vietnamese children". Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for social democracy and democratic socialism.

King stated in "Beyond Vietnam" that "true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." King quoted a United States official who said that from Vietnam to Latin America, the country was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King condemned America's "alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and said that the U.S. should support "the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World rather than suppressing their attempts at revolution.

King's stance on Vietnam encouraged Allard K. Lowenstein, William Sloane Coffin and Norman Thomas, with the support of anti-war Democrats, to attempt to persuade King to run against President Johnson in the 1968 United States presidential election. King contemplated but ultimately decided against the proposal on the grounds that he felt uneasy with politics and considered himself better suited for his morally unambiguous role as an activist.

On April 15, 1967, King participated and spoke at an anti-war march from Manhattan's Central Park to the United Nations. The march was organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and initiated by its chairman, James Bevel. At the U.N. King brought up issues of civil rights and the draft:

Seeing an opportunity to unite civil rights activists and anti-war activists, Bevel convinced King to become even more active in the anti-war effort. Despite his growing public opposition towards the Vietnam War, King was not fond of the hippie culture which developed from the anti-war movement. In his 1967 Massey Lecture, King stated:

We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.

Correspondence with Thích Nhất Hạnh

Thích Nhất Hạnh was an influential Vietnamese Buddhist who taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He had written a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 entitled: "In Search of the Enemy of Man". It was during his 1966 stay in the US that Nhất Hạnh met with King and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War. In 1967, King gave a famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, his first to publicly question the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Later that year, King nominated Nhất Hạnh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize. In his nomination, King said, "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of [this prize] than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity".

Poor People's Campaign, 1968

In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the " Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created an "economic bill of rights" for poor Americans.

The campaign was preceded by King's final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? which laid out his view of how to address social issues and poverty. King quoted from Henry George and George's book, Progress and Poverty, particularly in support of a guaranteed basic income. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C., demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States.

King and the SCLC called on the government to invest in rebuilding America's cities. He felt that Congress had shown "hostility to the poor" by spending "military funds with alacrity and generosity". He contrasted this with the situation faced by poor Americans, claiming that Congress had merely provided "poverty funds with miserliness". His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of "racism, poverty, militarism and materialism", and argued that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."

The Poor People's Campaign was controversial even within the civil rights movement. Rustin resigned from the march, stating that the goals of the campaign were too broad, that its demands were unrealizable, and that he thought that these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.

Assassination and aftermath

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees, who were represented by AFSCME Local 1733. The workers had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day.

On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the prophetic peroration of the last speech of his life, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

King was booked in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel (owned by Walter Bailey) in Memphis. Ralph Abernathy, who was present at the assassination, testified to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations that King and his entourage stayed at Room 306 so often that it was known as the "King-Abernathy suite". According to Jesse Jackson, who was present, King's last words on the balcony before his assassination were spoken to musician Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform that night at an event King was attending: "Ben, make sure you play ' Take My Hand, Precious Lord' in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty."

King was fatally shot by James Earl Ray at 6:01 p.m., Thursday, April 4, 1968, as he stood on the motel's second-floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. Abernathy heard the shot from inside the motel room and ran to the balcony to find King on the floor. Jackson stated after the shooting that he cradled King's head as King lay on the balcony, but this account was disputed by other colleagues of King; Jackson later changed his statement to say that he had "reached out" for King.

After emergency chest surgery, King died at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he "had the heart of a 60 year old", which Branch attributed to the stress of 13 years in the civil rights movement. King was initially interred in South View Cemetery in South Atlanta, but in 1977 his remains were transferred to a tomb on the site of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short, improvised speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of nonviolence. The following day, he delivered a prepared response in Cleveland. James Farmer Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response. The city of Memphis quickly settled the strike on terms favorable to the sanitation workers.

The plan to set up a shantytown in Washington, D.C., was carried out soon after the April 4 assassination. Criticism of King's plan was subdued in the wake of his death, and the SCLC received an unprecedented wave of donations for the purpose of carrying it out. The campaign officially began in Memphis, on May 2, at the hotel where King was murdered. Thousands of demonstrators arrived on the National Mall and stayed for six weeks, establishing a camp they called " Resurrection City".

President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to quell the riots by making several telephone calls to civil rights leaders, mayors and governors across the United States and told politicians that they should warn the police against the unwarranted use of force. However, his efforts did not work out: "I'm not getting through," Johnson told his aides. "They're all holing up like generals in a dugout getting ready to watch a war." Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the civil rights leader. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended King's funeral on behalf of the President, as there were fears that Johnson's presence might incite protests and perhaps violence. At his widow's request, King's last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church was played at the funeral, a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity". His good friend Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", at the funeral. The assassination helped to spur the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Two months after King's death, James Earl Ray-who was on the loose from a previous prison escape-was captured at London Heathrow Airport while trying to leave England on a false Canadian passport. He was using the alias Ramon George Sneyd on his way to white-ruled Rhodesia. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, though he recanted this confession three days later. On the advice of his attorney Percy Foreman, Ray pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and thus the possibility of receiving the death penalty. He was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Ray later claimed a man he met in Montreal, Quebec, with the alias "Raoul" was involved and that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. He spent the remainder of his life attempting, unsuccessfully, to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had. Ray died in 1998 at age 70.

Allegations of conspiracy

Ray's lawyers maintained he was a scapegoat similar to the way that John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is seen by conspiracy theorists. Supporters of this assertion said that Ray's confession was given under pressure and that he had been threatened with the death penalty. They admitted that Ray was a thief and burglar, but claimed that he had no record of committing violent crimes with a weapon. However, prison records in different U.S. cities have shown that he was incarcerated on numerous occasions for charges of armed robbery. In a 2008 interview with CNN, Jerry Ray, the younger brother of James Earl Ray, claimed that James was smart and was sometimes able to get away with armed robbery. Jerry Ray said that he had assisted his brother on one such robbery. "I never been with nobody as bold as he is," Jerry said. "He just walked in and put that gun on somebody, it was just like it's an everyday thing."

Those suspecting a conspiracy in the assassination point to the two successive ballistics tests which proved that a rifle similar to Ray's Remington Gamemaster had been the murder weapon. Those tests did not implicate Ray's specific rifle. Witnesses near King at the moment of his death said that the shot came from another location. They said that it came from behind thick shrubbery near the boarding house-which had been cut away in the days following the assassination-and not from the boarding house window. However, Ray's fingerprints were found on various objects (a rifle, a pair of binoculars, articles of clothing, a newspaper) that were left in the bathroom where it was determined the gunfire came from. An examination of the rifle containing Ray's fingerprints determined that at least one shot was fired from the firearm at the time of the assassination.

In 1997, King's son Dexter Scott King met with Ray, and publicly supported Ray's efforts to obtain a new trial.

Two years later, King's widow Coretta Scott King and the couple's children won a wrongful death claim against Loyd Jowers and "other unknown co-conspirators". Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found in favor of the King family, finding Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King and that government agencies were party to the assassination. William F. Pepper represented the King family in the trial.

In 2002, The New York Times reported that a church minister, Ronald Denton Wilson, claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson-not James Earl Ray-assassinated King. He stated, "It wasn't a racist thing; he thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way." Wilson provided no evidence to back up his claims.

King researchers David Garrow and Gerald Posner disagreed with William F. Pepper's claims that the government killed King. In 2003, Pepper published a book about the long investigation and trial, as well as his representation of James Earl Ray in his bid for a trial, laying out the evidence and criticizing other accounts. King's friend and colleague, James Bevel, also disputed the argument that Ray acted alone, stating, "There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man." In 2004, Jesse Jackson stated:

South Africa

King's legacy includes influences on the Black Consciousness Movement and civil rights movement in South Africa. King's work was cited by, and served as, an inspiration for South African leader Albert Lutuli, who fought for racial justice in his country during apartheid and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

United Kingdom

King influenced Irish politician and activist John Hume. Hume, the former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, cited King's legacy as quintessential to the Northern Irish civil rights movement and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, calling him "one of my great heroes of the century".

The Martin Luther King Fund and Foundation in the UK was set up as a charity on December 30, 1969, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and following a visit to the UK in 1969 by his widow, Coretta King.

In the late 1970s Wilfred Wood, a Barbadian-British Anglican, Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003, the first black bishop in the Church of England, and instrumental in the establishment of the foundation, became its chair. Wood was second in the "100 Great Black Britons" list in 2004. The 1989 Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture, entitled 'To Overcome is to Undertake', was given by the Rt Rev. Wilfred Wood, Bishop of Croydon. The text is still available. The foundation was removed from the Charity Commission list on November 18, 1996, as it had ceased to exist.

In the United Kingdom today, The Northumbria and Newcastle Universities Martin Luther King Peace Committee still exists to honor King's legacy, as represented by his final visit to the UK to receive an honorary degree from Newcastle University in 1967. The Peace Committee operates out of the chaplaincies of the city's two universities, Northumbria and Newcastle, both of which remain centres for the study of Martin Luther King and the US civil rights movement. Inspired by King's vision, it undertakes a range of activities across the UK as it seeks to "build cultures of peace".

In 2017, Newcastle University unveiled a bronze statue of King to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his honorary doctorate ceremony. The Students Union also voted to rename their bar Luthers.

United States

King has become a national icon in the history of American liberalism and American progressivism. His main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the U.S. Just days after King's assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing and housing-related transactions on the basis of race, religion, or national origin (later expanded to include sex, familial status, and disability). This legislation was seen as a tribute to King's struggle in his final years to combat residential discrimination in the U.S. The day following King's assassination, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise with her class of elementary school students in Riceville, Iowa. Her purpose was to help them understand King's death as it related to racism, something they little understood as they lived in a predominantly white community.

King's wife Coretta Scott King followed in her husband's footsteps and was active in matters of social justice and civil rights until her death in 2006. The same year that Martin Luther King was assassinated, she established the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to preserving his legacy and the work of championing nonviolent conflict resolution and tolerance worldwide. Their son, Dexter King, serves as the center's chairman. Daughter Yolanda King, who died in 2007, was a motivational speaker, author and founder of Higher Ground Productions, an organization specializing in diversity training.

On February 4, 1968, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in speaking about how he wished to be remembered after his death, King stated:

I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.

I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. And I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major. Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Beginning in 1971, cities such as St. Louis, Missouri, and states established annual holidays to honor King. At the White House Rose Garden on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it is called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Following President George H. W. Bush's 1992 proclamation, the holiday is observed on the third Monday of January each year, near the time of King's birthday. On January 17, 2000, for the first time, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all fifty U.S. states. Arizona (1992), New Hampshire (1999) and Utah (2000) were the last three states to recognize the holiday. Utah previously celebrated the holiday at the same time but under the name Human Rights Day.

Veneration

King was canonized by Archbishop Timothy Paul of the Holy Christian Orthodox Church (not to be confused with the Eastern Orthodox Church) on September 9, 2016, at the Christian Cathedral in Springfield, Massachusetts. His feast day was set as April 4, the date of his assassination. King is also honored with a Lesser Feast on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on April 4 or January 15, the anniversary of his birth. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates King liturgically on January 15.

Ideas, influences, and political stances

Christianity

As a Christian minister, King's main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. King's faith was strongly based in Jesus' commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injunction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus' teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52). In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus' "extremist" love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated:

Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don't plan to run for any political office. I don't plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I'm doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man.

King's private writings show that he rejected biblical literalism; he described the Bible as "mythological", doubted that Jesus was born of a virgin, suggested he may not have been bodily resurrected, and did not believe that the story of Jonah and the whale was true.

In 1959, King published a short book called The Measure of a Man, which contained his sermons " What is Man?" and "The Dimensions of a Complete Life". The sermons argued for man's need for God's love and criticized the racial injustices of Western civilization.

Nonviolence

Veteran African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was King's first regular advisor on nonviolence. King was also advised by the white activists Harris Wofford and Glenn Smiley. Rustin and Smiley came from the Christian pacifist tradition, and Wofford and Rustin both studied Mahatma Gandhi's teachings. Rustin had applied nonviolence with the Journey of Reconciliation campaign in the 1940s, and Wofford had been promoting Gandhism to Southern blacks since the early 1950s.

In the aftermath of the boycott, King wrote Stride Toward Freedom, which included the chapter Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. King outlined his understanding of nonviolence, which seeks to win an opponent to friendship, rather than to humiliate or defeat him. The chapter draws from an address by Wofford, with Rustin and Stanley Levison also providing guidance and ghostwriting.

King was inspired by Gandhi and his success with nonviolent activism, and as a theology student, King described Gandhi as being one of the "individuals who greatly reveal the working of the Spirit of God". King had "for a long time ... wanted to take a trip to India." With assistance from Harris Wofford, the American Friends Service Committee, and other supporters, he was able to fund the journey in April 1959. The trip to India affected King, deepening his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity."

King's admiration of Gandhi's nonviolence did not diminish in later years. He went so far as to hold up his example when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, hailing the "successful precedent" of using nonviolence "in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire ... He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury and courage."

Another influence for King's nonviolent method was Henry David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience and its theme of refusing to cooperate with an evil system. He also was greatly influenced by the works of Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and said that Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis left an "indelible imprint" on his thinking by giving him a theological grounding for his social concerns. King was moved by Rauschenbusch's vision of Christians spreading social unrest in "perpetual but friendly conflict" with the state, simultaneously critiquing it and calling it to act as an instrument of justice. However, he was apparently unaware of the American tradition of Christian pacifism exemplified by Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison. King frequently referred to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as central for his work. King also sometimes used the concept of " agape" (brotherly Christian love). However, after 1960, he ceased employing it in his writings.

Even after renouncing his personal use of guns, King had a complex relationship with the phenomenon of self-defense in the movement. He publicly discouraged it as a widespread practice, but acknowledged that it was sometimes necessary. Throughout his career King was frequently protected by other civil rights activists who carried arms, such as Colonel Stone Johnson, Robert Hayling, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

Criticism within the movement

King was criticized by other black leaders during the course of his participation in the civil rights movement. This included opposition by more militant thinkers such as Nation of Islam member Malcolm X. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founder Ella Baker regarded King as a charismatic media figure who lost touch with the grassroots of the movement as he became close to elite figures like Nelson Rockefeller. Stokely Carmichael, a protege of Baker's, became a black separatist and disagreed with King's plea for racial integration because he considered it an insult to a uniquely African-American culture. He also took issue that King's non-violence approach depended on appealing to America's conscience, feeling America had none to appeal to.

Activism and involvement with Native Americans

King was an avid supporter of Native American rights. Native Americans were also active supporters of King's civil rights movement which included the active participation of Native Americans. In fact, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) was patterned after the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was especially supportive in King's campaigns especially the Poor People's Campaign in 1968. In King's book Why We Can't Wait he writes:

King assisted Native American people in south Alabama in the late 1950s. At that time the remaining Creek in Alabama were trying to completely desegregate schools in their area. The South had many racial problems: In this case, light-complexioned Native children were allowed to ride school buses to previously all white schools, while dark-skinned Native children from the same band were barred from riding the same buses. Tribal leaders, upon hearing of King's desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, contacted him for assistance. He promptly responded and through his intervention the problem was quickly resolved.

In September 1959, King flew from Los Angeles, California, to Tucson, Arizona. After giving a speech at the University of Arizona on the ideals of using nonviolent methods in creating social change. He put into words his belief that one must not use force in this struggle "but match the violence of his opponents with his suffering." King then went to Southside Presbyterian, a predominantly Native American church, and was fascinated by their photos. On the spur of the moment, King wanted to go to an Indian Reservation to meet the people so Casper Glenn took King to the Papago Indian Reservation. At the reservation King met with all the tribal leaders, and others on the reservation then ate with them. King then visited another Presbyterian church near the reservation, and preached there attracting a Native American crowd. He later returned to Old Pueblo in March 1962 where he preached again to a Native American congregation, and then went on to give another speech at the University of Arizona. King would continue to attract the attention of Native Americans throughout the civil rights movement. During the 1963 March on Washington there was a sizable Native American contingent, including many from South Dakota, and many from the Navajo nation. Native Americans were also active participants in the Poor People's Campaign in 1968.

King was a major inspiration, along with the civil rights movement, of the Native American rights movement of the 1960s and many of its leaders. John Echohawk, a member of the Pawnee tribe who was the executive director and a founder of the Native American Rights Fund, stated:

As the leader of the SCLC, King maintained a policy of not publicly endorsing a U.S. political party or candidate: "I feel someone must remain in the position of non-alignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both-not the servant or master of either." In a 1958 interview, he expressed his view that neither party was perfect, saying, "I don't think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses ... And I'm not inextricably bound to either party." King did praise Democratic Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois as being the "greatest of all senators" because of his fierce advocacy for civil rights causes over the years.

King critiqued both parties' performance on promoting racial equality:

Actually, the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic party. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right-wing northern Republicans. And this coalition of southern Dixiecrats and right-wing reactionary northern Republicans defeats every bill and every move towards liberal legislation in the area of civil rights.

Although King never publicly supported a political party or candidate for president, in a letter to a civil rights supporter in October 1956 he said that he had not decided whether he would vote for Democrat Adlai Stevenson II or Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1956 presidential election, but that "In the past, I always voted the Democratic ticket." In his autobiography, King says that in 1960 he privately voted for Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy: "I felt that Kennedy would make the best president. I never came out with an endorsement. My father did, but I never made one." King adds that he likely would have made an exception to his non-endorsement policy for a second Kennedy term, saying "Had President Kennedy lived, I would probably have endorsed him in 1964."

King supported the ideals of democratic socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support due to the anti-communist sentiment being projected throughout the United States at the time, and the association of socialism with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the necessities of many American people, particularly the African-American community. King expressed that "the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism".

King was critical of American culture saying "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered" and that America must undergo a "radical revolution of values". King considered that in America "the problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor".

In a 1952 letter to Coretta Scott, he said: "I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic ..." In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and said, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." King further said that "capitalism has outlived its usefulness" and "failed to meet the needs of the masses". King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism", he rejected communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism", and its "political totalitarianism".

Compensation

King stated that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups.

He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils." He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races."

Television

Actress Nichelle Nichols planned to leave the science-fiction television series in 1967 after its first season, wanting to return to musical theater. She changed her mind after talking to King who was a fan of the show. King explained that her character signified a future of greater racial harmony and cooperation. King told Nichols, "You are our image of where we're going, you're 300 years from now, and that means that's where we are and it takes place now. Keep doing what you're doing, you are our inspiration." As Nichols recounted, " Star Trek was one of the only shows that [King] and his wife Coretta would allow their little children to watch. And I thanked him and I told him I was leaving the show. All the smile came off his face. And he said, 'Don't you understand for the first time we're seen as we should be seen. You don't have a black role. You have an equal role.'" For his part, the series' creator, Gene Roddenberry, was deeply moved upon learning of King's support.

State surveillance and coercion

FBI surveillance and wiretapping

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover personally ordered surveillance of King, with the intent to undermine his power as a civil rights leader. The Church Committee, a 1975 investigation by the U.S. Congress, found that "From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader."

In the fall of 1963, the FBI received authorization from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to proceed with wiretapping of King's phone lines, purportedly due to his association with Stanley Levison. The Bureau informed President John F. Kennedy. He and his brother unsuccessfully tried to persuade King to dissociate himself from Levison, a New York lawyer who had been involved with Communist Party USA. Although Robert Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's telephone lines "on a trial basis, for a month or so", Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.

The Bureau placed wiretaps on the home and office phone lines of both Levison and King, and bugged King's rooms in hotels as he traveled across the country. In 1967, Hoover listed the SCLC as a black nationalist hate group, with the instructions: "No opportunity should be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups ... to insure [sic] the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited."

NSA monitoring of King's communications

In a secret operation code-named " Minaret", the National Security Agency monitored the communications of leading Americans, including King, who were critical of the U.S. war in Vietnam. A review by the NSA itself concluded that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal".

Allegations of communism

Due to the relationship between King and Stanley Levison, the FBI feared Levison was working as an "agent of influence" over King, in spite of its own reports in 1963 that Levison had left the Party and was no longer associated in business dealings with them. Another King lieutenant, Jack O'Dell, was also linked to the Communist Party by sworn testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Despite the extensive surveillance conducted, by 1976 the FBI had acknowledged that it had not obtained any evidence that King himself or the SCLC were actually involved with any communist organizations.

For his part, King adamantly denied having any connections to communism. In a 1965 Playboy interview, he stated that "there are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida." He argued that Hoover was "following the path of appeasement of political powers in the South" and that his concern for communist infiltration of the civil rights movement was meant to "aid and abet the salacious claims of southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements." Hoover did not believe King's pledge of innocence and replied by saying that King was "the most notorious liar in the country". After King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, the FBI described King as "the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country". It alleged that he was "knowingly, willingly and regularly cooperating with and taking guidance from communists."

The attempts to prove that King was a communist was related to the feeling of many segregationists that blacks in the South were content with the status quo, but had been stirred up by "communists" and "outside agitators". As context, the civil rights movement in 1950s and '60s arose from activism within the black community dating back to before World War I. King said that "the Negro revolution is a genuine revolution, born from the same womb that produces all massive social upheavals-the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations."

CIA surveillance

Allegations of adultery

The FBI, having concluded that King was dangerous due to communist infiltration, began attempting to discredit King through revelations regarding his private life. FBI surveillance of King, some of it since made public, attempted to demonstrate that he also had numerous extramarital affairs. Lyndon B. Johnson once said that King was a "hypocritical preacher".

In his 1989 autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Ralph Abernathy stated that King had a "weakness for women", although they "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 a later interview, Abernathy said that he only wrote the term "womanizing", that he did not specifically say King had extramarital sex and that the infidelities King had were emotional rather than sexual.

In his 1986 book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote about a number of extramarital affairs, including one woman King saw almost daily. According to Garrow, "that relationship ... increasingly became the emotional centerpiece of King's life, but it did not eliminate the incidental couplings ... of King's travels." He alleged that King explained his extramarital affairs as "a form of anxiety reduction". Garrow asserted that King's supposed promiscuity caused him "painful and at times overwhelming guilt". King's wife Coretta appeared to have accepted his affairs with equanimity, saying once that "all that other business just doesn't have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed." Shortly after Bearing the Cross was released, civil rights author Howell Raines gave the book a positive review but opined that Garrow's allegations about King's sex life were "sensational" and stated that Garrow was "amassing facts rather than analyzing them".

The FBI distributed reports regarding such affairs to the executive branch, friendly reporters, potential coalition partners and funding sources of the SCLC, and King's family. The bureau also sent anonymous letters to King threatening to reveal information if he did not cease his civil rights work. The FBI-King suicide letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize read, in part:

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 [sic]). 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.

The letter was accompanied by a tape recording-excerpted from FBI wiretaps-of several of King's extramarital liaisons. King interpreted this package as an attempt to drive him to suicide, although William Sullivan, head of the Domestic Intelligence Division at the time, argued that it may have only been intended to "convince Dr. King to resign from the SCLC." King refused to give in to the FBI's threats.

In 1977, Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all known copies of the recorded audiotapes and written transcripts resulting from the FBI's electronic surveillance of King between 1963 and 1968 to be held in the National Archives and sealed from public access until 2027.

In May 2019, an FBI file emerged on which a handwritten note alleged that King "looked on, laughed and offered advice" as one of his friends raped a woman. Expert professional historians of the period who have examined this notional evidence have dismissed it as highly unreliable. David Garrow, author of an earlier biography of King, wrote that "the suggestion... that he either actively tolerated or personally employed violence against any woman, even while drunk, poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible". Garrow's reliance on a handwritten note addended to a typed report is considered poor scholarship by several other authorities. The Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, Peter Ling, pointed out that Garrow was excessively credulous, if not naive, in accepting the accuracy of FBI reports during a period when the FBI was undertaking a massive operation to attempt to discredit King as part of its COINTELPRO activities. Garrow had earlier referred to Ling's work on King, widely considered authoritative, as "thoughtful, perceptive, and thoroughly well-informed". Experts in 20th-century American history, including Distinguished Professor of Political Science Jeanne Theoharis, the professors Barbara Ransby of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Nathan Connolly of Johns Hopkins University and Professor Emeritus of History Glenda Gilmore of Yale University have expressed reservations about Garrow's scholarship. Theoharis commented "Most scholars I know would penalize graduate students for doing this." It is not the first time the care and rigor of Garrow's work has been called into serious question. Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King biographer and overseer of the Dr. King records at Stanford University states that he came to the opposite conclusion of Garrow saying "None of this is new. Garrow is talking about a recently added summary of a transcript of a 1964 recording from the Willard Hotel that others, including Mrs. King, have said they did not hear Martin's voice on it. The added summary was four layers removed from the actual recording. This supposedly new information comes from an anonymous source in a single paragraph in an FBI report. You have to ask how could anyone conclude King looked at a rape from an audio recording in a room where he was not present." Carson bases his position of Coretta Scott King's memoirs where she states "I set up our reel-to-reel recorder and listened. I have read scores of reports talking about the scurrilous activities of my husband but once again, there was nothing at all incriminating on the tape. It was a social event with people laughing and telling dirty jokes. But I did not hear Martin's voice on it, and there was nothing about sex or anything else resembling the lies J. Edgar and the FBI were spreading." The tapes that could confirm or refute the allegation are scheduled to be declassified in 2027.

Police observation during the assassination

A fire station was located across from the Lorraine Motel, next to the boarding house in which James Earl Ray was staying. Police officers were stationed in the fire station to keep King under surveillance. Agents were watching King at the time he was shot. Immediately following the shooting, officers rushed out of the station to the motel. Marrell McCollough, an undercover police officer, was the first person to administer first aid to King. The antagonism between King and the FBI, the lack of an all points bulletin to find the killer, and the police presence nearby led to speculation that the FBI was involved in the assassination.

Awards and recognition

King was awarded at least fifty honorary degrees from colleges and universities. On October 14, 1964, King became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to him for leading nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in the U.S. In 1965, he was awarded the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee for his "exceptional advancement of the principles of human liberty." In his acceptance remarks, King said, "Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free."

In 1957, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. Two years later, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. In 1966, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded King the Margaret Sanger Award for "his courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity." Also in 1966, King was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In November 1967, he made a 24-hour trip to the United Kingdom to receive an honorary Doctorate in Civil Law from Newcastle University, becoming the first African American the institution had recognised in this way. In a moving impromptu acceptance speech, he said

There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face not only in the United States of America but all over the world today. That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.

In 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was posthumously awarded to King by President Jimmy Carter. The citation read:

King and his wife were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

King was second in Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. In 1963, he was named Time Person of the Year, and, in 2000, he was voted sixth in an online "Person of the Century" poll by the same magazine. King placed third in the Greatest American contest conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL.

Five-dollar bill

Many memorial sites, buildings and sculptures have been created to honor Martin Luther King Jr, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, located in downtown San Jose, California, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial located in West Potomac Park next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., many other memorials have been made in The United States of America and in other countries to honor his legacy.

Discography

References

1. ^ Nelson, Alondra (2016). The Social Life of DNA. pp. 160-61. ISBN 978-0-8070-2718-9. Kittles informed King that his Y-chromosome DNA analysis traced to Ireland and his mtDNA analysis associated him with the Mende.

2. ^ Baldwin, Lewis V. (1991). There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Publishing. pp. 281-82. ISBN 0-8006-2457-2.

3. ^ Baldwin, Lewis V. (1991). There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. Minneapolis: Fortress Publishing. p. 167. ISBN 0-8006-2457-2.

4. ^ Ling, Peter (October 1996). "Plagiarism, preaching and prophecy: the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the persistence of racism [Review]". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 19 (4): 912-16. doi:10.1080/01419870.1996.9993942.

5. ^ Miller, Steven P. (2009). Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-8122-4151-8.

6. ^ Wilson, Michael (November 13, 2020). "Before 'I Have a Dream,' Martin Luther King Almost Died. This Man Saved Him". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020.

7. ^ Graham, Renee (February 4, 2002). "'King' is a Deft Exploration of the Civil Rights Leader's Stabbing". The Boston Globe. - via HighBeam Research (subscription required). Archived from the original on May 14, 2013.

8. ^ "Today in History, September 20". - via HighBeam Research (subscription required). Associated Press. September 19, 2012. Archived from the original on May 14, 2013.

9. ^ King Center:Billy Graham Archived March 15, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Accessed September 15, 2014

10. ^ "Martin Luther King mugshot April 12 1963". The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate. April 16, 2013. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013.

11. ^ McWhorter, Diane (2001). "Two Mayors and a King". Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-2648-6.

12. ^ Davis, Danny (January 16, 2007). "Celebrating the Birthday and Public Holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr". Congressional Record. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on July 28, 2013.

13. ^ El Naggar, Mona (August 22, 2013). "Found After Decades, a Forgotten Tape of King 'Thinking on His Feet'". The New York Times.

14. Hooper, Hartwell; Hooper, Susan (Fall 1999). "The Scripto Strike: Martin Luther King's 'Valley of Problems': Atlanta, 1964-1965". Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South. Atlanta Historical Society. XLIII (3): 5-34.

15. ^ Martin, Douglas (September 12, 2003). "Marie Foster, Early Fighter For Voting Rights, Dies at 85". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 23, 2014.

16. "Theodore Parker And The 'Moral Universe'". NPR. National Public Radio. September 2, 2010. Archived from the original on June 27, 2012.

17. ^ Dyson, Michael Eric (2008). "Facing Death". April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.'s death and how it changed America. Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00212-2.

18. ^ Dubner, Stephen (2022). "Episode 501: The University of Impossible-to-Get-Into". freakonomics.com. education is preparation for citizenship ... citizenship has to do with contributing to your own economic well-being, as well as contributing to the economic well-being of the broader society

19. Sturm, Douglas (1990). "Martin Luther King, Jr., as Democratic Socialist". The Journal of Religious Ethics. 18 (2): 79-105. ISSN 0384-9694. JSTOR 40015109.

20. ^ "King V. Jowers Conspiracy Allegations". United States Department of Justice Investigation of Recent Allegations Regarding the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. U.S. Department of Justice. June 2000.

21. ^ Blythe, Robert W.; Carroll, Maureen A. & Moffson, Steven H. (October 15, 1993). "National Register of Historic Places Registration: Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site" (PDF). National Park Service. and Accompanying 75 photos (16.9 MB)

22. Klein, Joe (2006). ^ Politics Lost: How American Democracy was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid. New York: Doubleday. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-385-51027-1

23. ^ McKnight, Gerald D. (1998). "'The Poor People Are Coming!' 'The Poor People Are Coming!'". The last crusade: Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and the poor people's campaign. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-3384-9.

24. ^ Gelder, Lawrence Van (April 24, 1998). "James Earl Ray, 70, Killer of Dr. King, Dies in Nashville". NYTimes.com. Archived from the original on February 10, 2014.

25. ^ Frank, Gerold (1972). An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Greatest Manhunt of our Time. Doubleday. p. 283.

26. ^ "Overview". United States Department of Justice Investigation of Recent Allegations Regarding the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. U.S. Department of Justice. June 2000. Archived from the original on January 13, 2013.

27. ^ Posner, Gerald (January 30, 1999). "The Truth About Memphis". The Washington Post. p. 2. Archived from the original on November 11, 2012.

28. ^ "Loyd Jowers, 73, Who Claimed A Role in the Killing of Dr. King". The New York Times. May 23, 2000. Archived from the original on July 15, 2014.

29. ^ Canedy, Dana (April 5, 2002). "A Minister Says His Father, Now Dead, Killed Dr. King". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 10, 2012.

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

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“We need to include the excluded and preach peace.” Pope Francis

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If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
-St. Francis de Assisi

Philip Fruytiers [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia I have been all things unholy.
If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.
-St. Francis de Assisi

While it is commonly known that St. Francis of Assisi was a lover of both creation and the Creator, his role as a grassroots environmentalist is often surprisingly underplayed in biographical synopsis of his life which center mainly upon his profound journey of faith.

Decreed the Patron Saint of the Environment/ Ecology and of Animals, Francis' latter life was not only an unblemished model of religious devotion, but an exemplary paragon of harmonious existence on Earth. He was a friend to man and beast, an admirer of the sun and of nature, and a peacemaker in every sense of the word.

Francis was not merely at peace with his fellow man -- he was at peace with all living things, everything beautiful that his eyes could behold. He wrote hymns of praise to his God for the creations he felt so blessed to behold, and he wrote poems to his "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon," even repeatedly praising his "Sister Death" upon his deathbed -- as he felt so much at one with creation that he considered the sun his brother, the moon, his sister, all men his siblings.

Francis felt compelled to reach out to the voiceless, the rejected, and the needy. He embraced and assisted lepers, whom, at the time, were outcasts of society, their skin condition causing them to be feared. He visited hospitals and cared for the sick. He sent food to thieves. He befriended women and recognized their abilities and their intelligence, a concept foreign in that time.

Yet again, his allegiance did not only lie with human beings. He was deeply committed to the well-being of the environment and of all of creation in as grass roots a fashion as has ever been seen. He lived with animals. He rejoiced amongst nature. He preached to the birds to remind them to praise their Creator for the blessings they had. He tamed a wild wolf and made it one of his many pets. Yet, he understood the plight of nature and the circle of life, albeit brutal at times. Despite, he felt that his Creator would not create evil, and hence, everything around him was good and accordingly, should be treated with courtesy and kindness and generosity, from the earthworm to the lamb, the cicada to the wolf. It is perhaps because they recognized his genuine sincerity towards their existence that the animals felt so drawn to him as well.

Simply put, Francis was a heartfelt ally to everything and everyone around him. From man to beast, from the trees to the stones, from the sun to the moon to the changing seasons - Francis was their kindred spirit. He did not call judgment on mankind for their use of the environment, be it animals for food, trees for shelter, etc. Instead, he simply urged humankind to show respect, humility, and love towards their fellow inhabitants of the earth and surroundings, and likewise, he expected the same from other creation. He felt that by embracing and rejoicing in the wonders around them, mankind would naturally then be drawn to perform acts out of love and respect rather than anger and domination.

He conversed with the universe. He spoke to his Brother Fire, his Sister Moon, with the fowl of the sky, and the beasts of the earth. Yet for as much as he lived in a spiritual realm, he was entirely human. He made no attempts to deify himself. He expected no reward for his life of service. He simply lived to serve and love in harmony.

Unknown author [Public domain] via Wikimedia

Yet his story is that much more profound considering the sacrifices he willingly made and the lifestyle he corrected to reach this oneness with creation.

Also known as Francis Bernardone, or il Poverello, St. Francis de Assisi was born Giovanni di Bernadone, named by his mother after John the Baptist on October 4th, 1181 in Umbria, Italy. The son of a rich cloth merchant, his father changed his name to Francis because he allegedly didn't want his child named after a saint. Though blessed with popularity and riches, Francis had a tumultous youth, with bouts both as a street fighter and as a soldier, and was considered to be one of the leaders of the dissident youth of the town of Assisi. While imprisoned after a battle, he had a life-altering spiritual experience which led him to a change of heart and change of life.

Upon his release, Francis gave up all material possessions, which, having come from a very wealthy family, was a large sacrifice. His mission then forward was to follow his faith, and he recognized that in order to do so, he must first rid himself of excess, of boastfullness, of ego -- traits that tyrannize our modern times as they did Francis'.

Dressed in ragged clothes, working as a brick layer, and often begging for his sustenance to survive, yet all the while preaching peace and purity, Francis' family and old friends either beheld him with great sorrow or with great embarrasment. Many even considered him a "religious nut" and treated him poorly, not understanding the depth of his calling. His father even attempted to have him imprisoned.

The Church also saw him as a threat. He was an unconventional revolutionary of sorts. His call for poverty, simplicity, and sincere love were seen as a threat to the status quo of the day.

Yet Francis' work pressed on.

By 1209 he had attracted followers and founded the Fransiscan order of brothers. In 1221 he resigned direction of the Fransiscans, but his work and his order still continue and thrive to this day.

Towards the end of his life, Francis already a frail man, was practically blind and very ill. In 1224, two years before his death, he received the stigmata, the actual wounds of Christ upon his hands. St. Francis of Assisi died on October 4th, 1226 at the age of 44 and was Canonized (made a saint) on July 16th, 1228 by Pope Gregory IX.

Cigoli [Public domain] via Wikimedia

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Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
-St. Francis de Assisi

It is said that St. Francis of Assisi inspired the Italian Renaissance, one of the greatest cultural revolutions the world has ever seen. His profound love for the beauty of nature sparked Italian painters to bring naturalism again into their work. His value for humanity also roused the Renaissance's own movement towards humanism. He was an inspiration in his lifetime and to consequent eras and even cultural movements as well as to modern-day heroes.

St. Francis de Assisi followed his calling gladly and without resentment. His Earthly sacrifices were not seen as a burden to him but as a natural path towards oneness with creation and the Creator. His story is perhaps most powerful in that he was a young man with every worldly thing going for him: his family was wealthy, his friends saw him as a fearless soldier, he was a natural leader, and he enjoyed the pleasures of the earth. Yet he sacrificed everything for his heartfelt beliefs and took it upon himself to care for all creation over his own well-being. By doing so, he gained much more - a profound and enchanting harmony with all creation.

He is a heroic example of sacrifice, of selflessness, of humility, and likewise, a reminder of the attainability of achieving a harmonious state of peace and unity with all creation by simply exuding love.

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If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. -St. Francis de Assisi Philip Fruytiers [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia I have been all things unholy.

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Great Thunberg was born on 3 January 2003. Her mother is a Swedish opera singer and her father an actor. Thunberg became aware of the threat of global warming from the age of eight, and couldn’t understand why so little was being done about it.

From a feeling of helplessness Thunberg became depressed and often stopped talking – a condition known as ‘selective mutism’. She was also diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Children with Asperger’s lack social communication and can end up with repetitive patterns of speech and behaviour. It is often considered a mild form of autism and overlaps with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thunberg says she doesn’t enjoy chit chat and for many years at school was very quiet and shy. But, her personality has been, in many ways a blessing for her role as social activist speaking unpalatable truths.

Thunberg says that she sees things in black and white – and in particular the clarity of real danger facing the planet. She said that the only thing that helped her to overcome her inner turmoil and depression was to protest and speak about climate change and environmental issues. Thunberg has said that she can’t let things go like other people, but she feels the inner drive to keep speaking about climate change, no matter how awkward or difficult it proves to be. Initially, the target of her activism was her parents. Her father remembered how she was very persistent with innemuerable arguments, data and graphs. He remembers it got to a point where he said: “Over the years, I ran out of arguments,” Her parents also were happy to see that her activism was a way out of her depression. Greta remembers that having the power to persuade her parents gave her confidence she could do something with her life.

“That’s when I kind of realised I could make a difference. And how I got out of that depression was that I thought: it is just a waste of time feeling this way because I can do so much good with my life. I am trying to do that still now.”

In May 2018, when she was 15, she won an essay writing competition on the environment held by a Swedish newspaper. This led to her attending meetings with an environmental group Fossil