Martin Luther King Jr

This story is about a civil rights activist named Martin Luther King Jr. who aspired to achieve legal equality for African American People in the United States throughout the 1950s. 

My hatred for racial segregation started after I worked on a tobacco farm in Connecticut. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere and not be segregated from white folks.  

I attended Morehouse College in 1944 where I met Benjamin Mays. Mr. Mays was a social gospel activist who believed that the Black church should focus on the future rather than the here and now. It was a call to action I would never forget.  

After I graduated in 1948, I went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where I learned of Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence as well as contemporary Protestant theologians. I learned about who god was and what he was doing.

I earned my Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. From Crozer, I went to Boston University where I studied man's relationship to god and earned my doctorate in 1955.

When in Boston, I met a lady named Coretta Scott who would later become my wife. We got married in 1953 and had four kids.  I eventually became the pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

On December 1st, 1955 a lady by the name of Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. After the incident, the Montgomery Approvemnet Association was formed and I was chosen to be their leader. 

After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, I organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which gave me the opportunity to speak throughout the south.  

In 1960, I moved to Atlanta where I continued to pursue the civil rights movement. In October, I was arrested for protesting segregation at the lunch counter in an Atlanta department store. The charges were eventually dropped, but I was sentenced to a prison farm for violating my probation on a traffic offense that happened months earlier.