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Martin Luther King Jr.: Leader And Social Activist

Decent Essays
Victoria Karavan #14
Mr.Wong
6 February 2017

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a great person who had changed the nation in many ways. He was a baptist minister and social activist who had led the civil rights movement in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America and was killed April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee. His main goal was to make the world more fair. Martin Luther King Jr. did not want people to be judged by their color but by their character. He had joined organized protests because King disagreed with the rules he and his race had to follow. Other people also did not agree and helped King as well.. He also had experienced the prejudices
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led a interesting life that everyone today looks back to. One interesting fact is that his original name was Michael King Jr. Also, he hated the way things were so he decided to change them. He later on in his life became a leader and made things better for the colored people. However, injustice for them still stayed the same, but he still never gave up. Some things he did were in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 which included his campaign to end the segregation at lunch counters and in the hiring practices drew nationwide attention when the police turned off and some fire hoses on the demonstrators. Martin Luther King jr. was jailed along with the huge numbers of his supporters, including hundreds of school children. In the Birmingham jail, he wrote in a letter stating, “You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path? You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” So far Martin Luther King Jr had been put in jail about twenty-one times because of the marches and protests he had done with others. Further, his eager to end segregation put him in those positions…show more content…
childhood and his early years was a thought-provoking one. King had come from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition the southern black ministry. Both of his parents and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated and King’s father had successfully succeeded his father-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlantic. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “black Wall Street,” The place was home to some of the country's largest and most prosperous black businesses and black churches and the years before the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King jr. received a solid education which had helped him very much in the future. He was very young and King had grown up in a loving extended family. Dearest to King was his was his maternal grandmother. Her death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable because Martin Luther King Jr. was very upset because he had learned of his grandmother's fatal heart attack while he attended a parade without his parents permission. Learning of this he attempted suicide by jumping from a second story window. Later in 1944, at age 15, Martin Luther King Jr. entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost the enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like Martin Luther King Jr. However before beginning college, he had spent his summer on a tobacco farm in
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