Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, in the United States, is a holiday celebrated on the third Monday in January to honor the achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was an African American Christian minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
Born Michael Luther King, Jr. on January 15, 1929, he later changed his first name to Martin. He attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduated from high school at the age of fifteen, and went on to receive a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Morehouse College in 1948. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, Martin was awarded the Bachelor of Divinity Degree in 1951. After winning a fellowship at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate school at Boston University, completing his doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955.
Dr. King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He advocated the use of nonviolent means to end racial segregation, and was a strong supporter of the bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery in 1955. 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. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and led the March on Washington in 1963. On August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington, Dr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. During the speech, he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. In his speech, Dr. King said:
"So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!"
Known as the most influential of African American civil rights leaders during the 1960's, Dr. King was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1964, 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, he was assassinated. Almost immediately after Dr. King’s death, there were calls for a national holiday in his honor. Beginning in 1970 a number of states and cities made his birthday, January 15, a holiday. In 1983 legislation making the third Monday in January a federal holiday was passed, and the first observance nationwide of Martin Luther King Day was in 1986.