Martin Luther King (1929-68)

US civil rights leader. Born on 15 January 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister, he graduated from Morehouse College and took a theology doctorate at Boston University. He was much influenced by the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1954, King was appointed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He immediately became involved in local civil rights campaigns to end the segregation of blacks and whites.

From December 1955, he led the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted a year, against the segregation of seats on public transport. During this time, his home was bombed and his family threatened.

He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and became a national leader of the non-violent civil rights movement. Imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, for taking part in a protest march, he was released in time for the huge 'March on Washington' of 28 August 1963, during which he addressed a 200,000-strong crowd from the Lincoln Memorial, proclaiming 'I have a dream'.

His personal integrity, calm determination and ability to sum up popular feeling through magnificent rhetoric increased his moral authority over the movement. However, this was somewhat damaged when more radical militants such as Malcolm X began to challenge his non-violent tactics.

After President Kennedy's assassination, a nationwide tide of support for King's ideas resulted in the Civil Rights Act 1964, which was heavily backed by President Lyndon B Johnson, being enacted by the US Congress.

Awarded the Nobel prize for peace, King continued to campaign against injustice, leading a march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Confronted by state troopers, he knelt in prayer and withdrew, an act that was criticised by Black Power militants, who opposed his integrationist message.

In 1966, King moved north to protest at racism in Chicago, and he was soon campaigning against the Vietnam War, a change of tactics that was condemned by many of his white supporters. While planning a Poor People's March on Washington, he was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support a sanitation workers' strike. His murder was followed by riots in many of the major cities throughout the United States.

In 1986, the third Monday of January was declared Martin Luther King Day.

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