The Birth of Martin Luther King Jr.
Born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. would grow up to lead the American civil rights movement with nonviolence.
The birth certificate said “Michael.” But the world would come to know him by another name: Martin Luther King Jr.
He was born on January 15, 1929, in a two-story Victorian house in Atlanta, Georgia — the second of three children of the Reverend Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. His grandfather had been the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the family soon made that church the center of their lives. After a trip to Germany in 1934, King Sr. changed both his own name and his son’s to Martin Luther, in honor of the great Protestant reformer.
The boy was brilliant. He skipped the ninth and twelfth grades and entered Morehouse College at just fifteen. Following his father and grandfather into the ministry, he earned a divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951 and a doctorate from Boston University in 1955. In Boston he met Coretta Scott, a singer studying at the New England Conservatory; they married in 1953 and would raise four children together.
In 1954, King became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. A year later, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Montgomery’s Black community launched a boycott of the city buses — and chose the 26-year-old newcomer to lead it. The boycott lasted 381 days and ended with a Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. A leader was born.
King went on to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to champion nonviolent protest — sit-ins, marches, and peaceful demonstrations that exposed the cruelty of segregation to the whole nation. He wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and in 1964 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, declaring: “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
His life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, when he was just 39. But his work outlived him: a national holiday honors him every January, hundreds of American streets bear his name, and his memorial stands on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. — a stone giant gazing toward the future he spent his life trying to build.
Why does a birthday matter? Because January 15, 1929, was the day the civil rights movement gained its voice — a voice that proved moral courage, armed only with love and discipline, could move a nation.
Photo: Martin Luther King Jr. with fellow marchers at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 1963 — public domain image (Rowland Scherman / U.S. Information Agency, NARA) via Wikimedia Commons.
