He had a dream: A look at the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
1929
Jan. 15: Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia to teacher Alberta King and Baptist minister Michael King. A few years after his birth Michael King Sr. changed his own name to Martin Luther King, in honor of the Protestant reformer. The father changed his son’s name as well.
1944
Sept. 20: At age 15, King graduates high school and begins his freshman year at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
1946
June 3: U.S. Supreme Court outlaws segregation in interstate transportation. In Morgan vs. Commonwealth of Virginia, the court found that the Virginia statute requiring racial segregation on buses interferes with interstate commerce, in violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) begins its first Freedom Ride through the South, in a Greyhound bus, shortly after the decision.
Aug. 6: The Atlanta Constitution publishes Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter to the editor stating that black people “are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens.”
1948
King graduates from Morehouse with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Feb. 25: King is ordained at age 19 and becomes associated minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, during his breaks from Crozer and Boston University.
July 14: Objecting to the progressive civil rights platform at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Mississippi and Alabama delegates walk out.
Sept. 14: King enrolls in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.
1951
May 6-8: King graduates from Crozer with a bachelor of divinity degree, delivering the valedictory address at commencement.
September: King begins Ph.D. studies at Boston University.
1953
June 18: King marries Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, at the Scott home near Marion, Alabama. They eventually have four children.
1954
September: King begins a ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
1955
June 5: King is awarded his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University.
Dec. 1: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery. Jo Ann Robinson and other Women’s Political Council members mimeograph thousands of leaflets calling for a one-day boycott of the city’s buses.
Dec. 5: On the day of the boycott, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) is formed. King is elected president. His leadership of the bus boycott garners national attention. It’s his first experience and recognition as a civil rights leader.
1956
Jan. 27: According to King’s later account, he receives a threatening phone call late in the evening. He said the call prompted a revelation that filled him with strength to carry on his civil rights fight, in spite of persecution.
Jan. 30: At 9:15 p.m., while King speaks at a mass meeting, his house is bombed. His wife and daughter are not injured. Later King pleads for nonviolence to an angry crowd of supporters that gathers outside the house.
Nov. 13: The U.S. Supreme Court affirms the lower court opinion in Browder vs. Gayle, declaring Montgomery and Alabama bus segregation laws unconstitutional. Montgomery decides to desegregate buses.
Dec. 21: Montgomery City Lines resumes integrated service on all routes and King is among the first passengers to ride.
1957
Jan. 10-11: Southern black ministers meet in Atlanta to share strategies in the fight against segregation. King is named chairman of the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration (later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC).
Feb. 18: King appears on the cover of “Time” magazine.
May 17: At the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in front of a crowd of more than 15,000, King delivers his first national address, on voting rights: “Give Us The Ballot.”
June 13: King and Ralph D. Abernathy meet with Vice President Richard M. Nixon and issue a statement on their meeting, announcing a voter registration campaign in the South, to get African Americans to the polls in the 1958 election. The statement said voting clinics would teach African Americans to “overcome the contrived and artificial obstacles to their registering and voting.”
1958
June 23: King and other civil rights leaders meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington to discuss problems affecting black Americans.
Sept. 17: King’s first book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” about the bus boycott, is published.
Sept. 20: During a book signing at Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem, New York, King is stabbed by a mentally ill woman, Izola Ware Curry. He is rushed to Harlem Hospital where doctors remove a 7-inch letter opener from his chest, the tip at the edge of his aorta. He later referenced the near-fatal atttack in his 1968 speech “I have Been to the Mountaintop.” “… I, too, am happy I didn’t sneeze.”
1959
February: King goes to India for a month to study Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He meets with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and many of Gandhi’s followers.
1960
February: King moves from Montgomery to Atlanta to devote more time to SCLC and the freedom struggle. He joins his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church as assistant pastor.
Lunch counter sit-ins begin in Greensboro, North Carolina.
May 25-28: King is found not guilty of tax fraud by a white jury in Montgomery.
June 23: King meets privately in New York with Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
Oct. 19-27: King is arrested during a sit-in demonstration at a department store in Atlanta. He is sentenced to four months hard labor for violating a suspended sentence for a 1956 traffic violation. After more than a week in jail, he is released on $2,000 bond.
1961
May 21: Freedom Riders seeking to integrate bus terminals are assaulted in Alabama earlier in the month and King addresses a rally of 1,500 at a Montgomery church. The audience is trapped inside the church as a white mob of thousands gathers outside. King calls Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who directs the Alabama governor to disperse the mob. National Guard troops final break up the crowd outside the church after a night of rioting, and escort the families inside to their homes.
Oct. 16: King meets with President Kennedy and urges him to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation to eliminate racial segregation.
Oct. 19: In Atlanta, King is arrested during a sit-in while waiting to be served at a restaurant. He is sentenced to four months in jail, but after intervention by President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he is released.
November: The Freedom Riders’ work pays off when the Interstate Commerce Commission bans segregation in interstate travel.
1962
July 27-Aug. 10: King is arrested at an Albany, Georgia prayer vigil and jailed. After two weeks in jail, he is released.
Sept. 28: During the closing session of the SCLC conference in Birmingham, Alabama, a member of the American Nazi Party hits King in the face.
1963
April 12: Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor arrests King and Ralph Abernathy for demonstrating without a permit.
April 16: Responding to eight Jewish and Christian clergymen’s call for African Americans to wait patiently for justice, King pens his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He writes, “You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birminham. But I am sorry that your statement didn’t express similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.”
April 19: King and Abernathy are released from jail.
May 7: Conflict in Birmingham reaches its peak when high-pressure fire hoses force demonstrators from the business district. In addition to hoses, Police Commissioner Connor authorizes dogs, clubs and cattle prods to disperse 4,000 demonstrators in downtown Birmingham.
June 5: A compilation of King’s sermons, “Strength to Love,” is published.
June 23: King leads 125,000 people on a Freedom Walk in Detroit.
Aug. 28: King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march to the Lincoln Memorial is the largest civil rights demonstration in history, with nearly 250,000 people. The march is supported by all major civil rights organizations, as well as by many labor and religious groups. Afterward, King and other civil rights leaders meet with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House.
Sept. 15: In Birmingham, a dynamite blast kills four girls attending Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Sept. 18: King delivers the eulogy at the funerals of Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, three of the four children who were killed by the bomb.
Oct. 10: Robert Kennedy authorizes the FBI to wiretap King’s home phone. He believed one of King’s (white) associates was a leader and financer in the Communist Party USA, but the decision was widely reviled once it became known shortly after King’s assassination.
Nov. 22: President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
1964
Jan. 3: King is named “Man of the Year” by “Time” magazine.
Jan. 18: President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with King and other civil rights leaders, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and James Farmer, to seek support for his War on Poverty initiative.
March 26: King meets Malcolm X in Washington, D.C. It’s the only time the two met.
June: King’s book “Why We Can’t Wait” is published.
June 11: King is arrested protesting for the integration of public accommodations in St. Augustine, Florida.
June 21: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers who were registering black voters during the Freedom Summer campaign, are reported missing.
July 2: King attends the signing ceremony of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by President Johnson at the White House.
July 20: King and SCLC members launch a tour of Mississippi to assist the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the Freedom Summer campaign.
Aug. 4: The FBI finds the bodies of the three civil rights workers buried near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Nov. 18: After King criticizes the FBI’s failure to protect civil rights workers, the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, denounces King as “the most notorious liar in the country.” A week later he says SCLC is “spearheaded by Communists and moral degenerates.”
Dec. 1: King meets with FBI Director Hoover at the Justice Department. He says the meeting is “amicable.”
Dec. 10: King receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. At 35, he becomes the youngest recipient of the prize. He declares “every penny” of the $54,000 award will be used in the civil rights struggle.
1965
The King family moves to a new home in Atlanta.
March 7: In an event that becomes known as “Bloody Sunday,” voting rights marchers are beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as they attempt to march to Montgomery. In reaction to the attack, President Johnson addresses the nation, declaring he will submit a voting right act to Congress, and uses the slogan made famous by the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”
March 17-25: King, James Forman and John Lewis lead civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery after a U.S. District judge upholds the right of demonstrators to conduct an orderly march. Federal troops are mobilized to protect the more than 3,000 protestors.
Aug. 6: The 1965 Voting Rights Act is signed by President Johnson; King is given one of the pens.
Aug. 12: King publicly opposes the Vietnam War at a mass rally at the Ninth Annual Convention of SCLC in Birmingham.
1966
Jan. 26: King and Coretta move into an apartment in Chicago to draw attention to the city’s poor housing conditions.
June 6: Civil rights activist James Meredith is shot by a sniper during the March Against Fear, near Memphis. He survived the attempted assassination.
June 7: King, Floyd McKissick of CORE and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC resume Meredith’s march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi.
1967
April 4: King delivers the speech “Beyond Vietnam” to a gathering of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. He demands that the U.S. take action to end the war.
June: King’s book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” is published.
July 6: The Justice Department reports that more than 50 percent of all eligible black voters in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina are now registered.
Oct. 30: The Supreme Court upholds a conviction of King by a Birmingham court for demonstrating without a permit. King spends four days in a Birmingham jail.
Dec. 4: King publicly reveals his plans to organize a mass civil disobedience campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign, in Washington, D.C., to force an end to poverty.
1968
March 28: King leads 6,000 protesters in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. The march descends into violence and looting, and King is rushed from the scene.
April 3: King returns to Memphis, determined to lead a peaceful march. During an evening rally at Mason Temple in Memphis, King delivers his final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
April 4: At sunset, King is shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Sniper James Earl Ray is later convicted of the murder, which sparks riots and disturbances in 130 U.S. cities and results in mass arrests.
April 9: King is buried in Atlanta. His funeral is an international event, and his coffin is carried on a mule cart followed by more than 50,000 mourners. Within a week of the assassination, the Open Housing Act is passed by Congress.
1983
Nov. 2: President Ronald Reagan signs a bill that creates a federal holiday to honor King. It’s to be celebrated near his Jan. 15 birthday, on the third Monday in January.
1986: King’s birthday is observed as a national holiday for the first time. Some states resist the holiday. It wasn’t officially observed in all 50 states until 2000.
2011
Aug. 26-28: The dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. is held.
Sources:
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University;
Martin Luther King Jr. Research Guides, Louisiana State University Libraries;
Here are some ways to honor Martin Luther King Jr. in Snohomish County
Martin Luther King Day is Jan. 16 this year.
The federal holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. is a day to honor the life and legacy of the late civil rights leader.
For many in Snohomish County the third Monday in January is a day of community service, a day to promote equal rights for all Americans and a day to reflect on King’s mission and teachings.
1. The annual Whidbey Island Martin Luther King Jr. “Blessed Are The Peacemakers” event at St. Augustine’s-in-the-Woods from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Jan. 16 will feature interactive readings on the martyrs of Selma and voting rights, recordings of King’s speeches, musical performances and a keynote speaker.
Free lunch provided from noon to 12:45 p.m.
St. Augustine’s is at 5217 Honeymoon Bay Road, Freeland. Call 360-678-5071 for more.
Also in Freeland, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Whidbey Island will screen the PBS Tavis Smiley special, “A Call to Conscience,” at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 16. The church is at 20103 Highway 525.
On April 4, 1967, King delivered the controversial speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” about his opposition to the war in Vietnam. The one-hour special includes his speech and commentary. Call 360-342-1457 for more.
2. Global Peace Foundation USA, Service for Peace, Corporation for National & Community Services, and Lynnwood Parks & Recreation are hosting an MLK Day of Service for youth ages 14-18 on Jan. 18. Meet at Prestige Care Inc., 21008 76th Ave. W, Edmonds, to volunteer from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Service projects will include poster making for Meadowdale Elementary School, writing letters for the Lynnwood Food Bank and trail rehabilitation at the Lynnwood Golf Course.
Lunch will be provided.
Call 406-794-2847 or email usyouth@globalpeace.org for more information.
3. Treat your fellow Americans with dignity and respect, regardless of their background.
— Sara Bruestle, Herald writer
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