Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream” Does this sound familiar, is that something that changed your life or something you know nothing about? For me, I hear that phrase and I feel a sense of accomplishment and freedom. Well Martin Luther King Jr. stated that in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. in 1963. This man was a legacy and did many things for the African American culture, which in the end got him assassinated. There were many things that led up to his assassination. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia. He was the son of Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. He had an older sister, Christine King Farris, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King. King grew up in Atlanta and attended Booker T. Washington High School. Because of his high scores on the college entrance examinations in his junior year of high school, he advanced to Morehouse College without a formal graduation from Booker T. Washington. Having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, Dr. King entered Morehouse at the age of fifteen. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Sociology. He went to Crozer Theological Seminary near Chester, Pennsylvania where he graduated with a Bachelor’s of Divinity in May 8, 1951. King then begun Doctorial Studies in Systematic Theology at Boston University and received his doctorate of philosophy on June 5th, 1955.
He married Coretta Scott on June 8, 1953 on the lawn of her parents’ home in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama. King and Scott had four children; Yolanda, Martin Luther King III, Dextor Scott, and Bernice King. King became a pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama when he was only 25 years old. He joined the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1 for refusing to give up her bus seat. On December 5 King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and he became the official spokesperson for the boycott, which became one of the most prominent events of the civil rights movement. The boycott lasted 385 days. The situation became so tense, that King’s house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign which ended with The United States district court ruling in Browder vs. Gale that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery Public busses.
The things that led up to his assassination was the Bloody Sunday. The Bloody Sunday was attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery for March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7th was avoided because of the mob of police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the civil rights movement.
Another event that led up was Chicago. In 1966, after several successes in South, King and others in the Civil Rights Organization tried to spread the movement to the North.
Another event that led up was The Vietnam War. Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about The United States role in The Vietnam War. In April 4th, 1967, appearance at the New York’s Riverside Church exactly 1 year before his death, King delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam.” In this speech, he spoke strongly about the U.S’s role in the war, insisting 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 also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes. King was also opposed to the Vietnam War on the grounds that the war took many resources that could have been spent on social warfare, services like war on poverty. King also stated that in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech 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 spoke at the
