was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia into a middle-class family. Both his father and his grand-father pastored the Ebenezer Baptist Church; they were also prominent in National Baptist Convention, their denomination’s largest organization. King attended college at Morehouse College, then Crozer Seminary, and then he went to Boston University. During his education, King studied, as stated in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s by David Howard-Pitney, “theories for social change advanced by such thinkers as socialist Karl Marx and Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian independence leader and proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience as a tool for social political change” (Howard-Pitney 4). As a result, King believed in change without violence. Then in 1954, King became the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. During the Montgomery bus boycott, he became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. King, along with other African American leaders, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The goal was use mass nonviolent actions and civil disobedience to mount and coordinate civil rights activities. Throughout civil rights movement, King traveled across the country, making speeches, raising money for the SCLC and other civil rights groups, and collecting supporters for African Americans’ civil rights. King “led many Americans to view the peaceful black Civil Rights movement as morally right…” (Howard-Pitney 6). Without King, many Americans would not care or would not know about the civil rights movement; King was able to successfully spread awareness about it and that is why the civil rights movement was a success. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 on a