Martin
Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and social
activist who played a key role in the American civil rights movement
from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968.
- Both his father and grandfather before him were Baptist ministers. Even so, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that he'd follow in their footsteps. King was an extremely gifted student, skipping a couple of grades and going to college at 15. He was on the verge of rejecting his faith altogether and becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but somewhere along the line he changed his mind, possibly die to the influence of the president of his college, Benjamin E. Mays, a noted theologian. King realised that the Bible had “many profound truths which one cannot escape” and became a minister after all.
- His name at birth wasn't Martin, but Michael. His father was also called Michael at the time, but after a trip to Germany was so inspired by the life of Martin Luther that he changed his name to Martin Luther King, and also decided to change the name of his five year old son to Martin Luther King Jr.
- King married Coretta Scott King in 1953. At that time, there were no hotels which would allow a black couple to use their honeymoon suites - so a friend of his who owned a funeral parlour let him spend his wedding night there instead.
- He survived an assassination attempt in 1958. He was signing copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom when a woman called Izola Ware Curry. She asked if he was Martin Luther King Jr. - he said yes, and Curry said, “I’ve been looking for you for five years,” and stabbed him in the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. The tip of the blade was touching his aorta, and took hours of surgery to remove. Surgeons said that if King had so much as sneezed during that time, it would have punctured his aorta and killed him. In true Christian spirit, he forgave his attacker and bore her no ill will.
- King served 29 prison sentences himself - mostly for civil disobedience, but also judges were especially harsh if he broke the rules even a tiny bit. He went to prison in 1956 for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25-miles an hour zone.
- He encouraged others to be role models, most notably Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura in the original Star Trek series. She was considering leaving the show, but King persuaded her to carry on, because she was a black woman playing a major role and not the stereotypes usually played by black people at the time. She was playing a character who was equal to everyone she was working with. Nichols was convinced, and stayed in the role, where she was seen by a young Whoopi Goldberg who exclaimed, “Momma! There’s a black lady on TV, and she ain’t no maid!” Goldberg would later star in the Star Trek Next Generation series as well as numerous films. Astronaut Ronald McNair, the second black person in space, was also inspired by Nichols to believe it was possible for him to follow that career. Sadly, he died in the Challenger explosion.
- In 1964, King won a Nobel Peace Prize, and was the youngest person at that time ever to win one, at the age of 35. While he's no longer the youngest recipient (Malala Yousafzai won it in 2014 at the age of 17) he is still the youngest male Peace Prize winner. King donated all his prize money to the Civil Rights Movement. That wasn't the only award he ever won. He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal and a Medal of Freedom. He also won a Grammy award in 1971 for Best Spoken Word Album for “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam”. In 1963, he became the first African-American to be named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. Plus every major US city has a street named after him - over 700 streets in the USA bear his name.
- Despite being a straight A student most of the time, he did get a C in his first year at seminary - for public speaking! One suspects the teacher concerned disagreed with what he said rather than him having any lack of talent.
- King was a lifelong smoker, although he tried his best to hide the fact, because it was frowned upon in the church at the time, and also because he didn't want his children to take up the habit. He never smoked in front of them, and didn't like having his picture taken with a cigarette. He was shot while taking a smoking break on the balcony. One of his associates said later that he removed the cigarette butt and packet of cigarettes from King's pocket before the ambulance came for him, so people wouldn't know King had been smoking. An autopsy revealed that though King was only 39 years old when he died, his heart was more like that of a 60-year-old, probably due to stress.
- King's mother was also shot dead, in 1974, at the age of 69. She was playing the organ in church at the time. Killer Marcus Wayne Chenault Jr. claimed he had divine instructions to kill King’s father, who was in the congregation, he killed King’s mother instead because she was nearer. Chenault received a death sentence but it was later changed to life imprisonment, in part because the King family opposed capital punishment.
See also
10 Quotes from Martin Luther King
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