Born in a middle-class Black family on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, King grew up amid the segregated South his father, a Baptist minister, quietly resisted. He would go on to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, deliver the 'I Have a Dream' speech, and win the Nobel Peace Prize before his assassination in 1968. His birthday is now a U.S. federal holiday.
Michael King Jr. entered the world in his grandparents' Queen Anne-style house on Auburn Avenue, a thriving Black middle-class street in Atlanta known as 'Sweet Auburn.' His father, Michael King Sr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, later changed both his own name and his son's to Martin Luther after a trip to Germany inspired by the Protestant reformer.
The boy who would become the twentieth century's most consequential American orator grew up sheltered from the worst of Jim Crow by his father's relative prosperity, yet he never escaped its humiliations — being forced to give up his seat to white passengers, watching his father erupt in fury at a shoe store clerk who demanded they move to the back.
By 26 he was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott; by 34 he stood before the Lincoln Memorial and told a quarter-million people about a dream. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 at just 39. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation making King's birthday a federal holiday, first observed in 1986 — one of only a few Americans honored with a national day bearing his name.
Key people: Martin Luther King Jr.