F.A.W.T. - Free All With Truth

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) 


"I have a dream . . ."

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the third generation of a family of preachers.  He attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen.  After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania...he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class. 

His grandfather had began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin began his preaching career.  Later, guided by his social conscience, Martin accepted an invitation to lead a congregation in Birmingham, Alabama.  Both he and Coretta Scott King both cared deeply about the cause of freedom and equality, and Birmingham was cornerstone to the Movement at the time.

It was not long before, in December of 1955, he was given the opportunity for leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the US, the famous bus boycott. Martin gave a speech and flyers were distributed.  Unsure of the turnout, much to Martin and Coretta's joy and suprise, the following morning the buses were empty.  The boycott had begun, the people well on their way to freedom.  During these days, however, King was arrested, abused, and his home was bombed, yet at the same time he emerged as a Civil Rights leader of the first rank. After continuing 382 days, on December 21, 1956, the people had won their freedom.  The U.S. Supreme Court declared the laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional, and African-Americans and whites rode the buses together as equals.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi.  In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.  In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution.  He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters.  He directed the peaceful march of 250,000 people on Washington, D.C., to whom he delivered his address, "I Have a Dream". he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson.  He was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times.  He was awarded five honorary degrees, was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.