EARLY LIFE BACKGROUND OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta Georgia. King was born into a powerful and wealthy minister family. The King family were pioneers in the fight for Negro equality. His grandfather was one of the first heads of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP and his father was one of the heads of the fight for equal salaries for Negro teachers in Georgia. His father’s ministry was in the black churches. In his town and society, the church was an enduring symbol and the church was run like a dynasty. Even as a young child, King showed his thoughts on non-violence and his feelings on segregation. King once said, “I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect”. As a child in school, a bully punched King and he did not return a blow. Another time, a white woman slapped him and said, “You’re the nigger who stepped on my foot” and King said nothing. King, Sr.’s thinking for his children was if they were going to be someone, they had to suffer. King, Jr. was a very bright child.

At the age of 15, he skipped grades and began to attend Morehouse College. He left Morehouse with a bachelor’s degree and he was an ordained minister in the Baptist church. King felt that education should give men “noble ends” and that this was “intelligence plus character” and that this would help bring about liberation for people.

After Morehouse, King decided to go to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. This was a very liberal institution and his father did not approve. However, this would be the first time King would step into an integrated racially institution. It was at this point that King learned the feeling of freedom of thinking. He was away from the South and from the black church and was able to continue to become well versed in philosophy, theology, and politics. He also read everything by Gandhi. These readings truly shaped King’s thinking and ideals. “The spirit of passive resistance came to me from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus…the techniques of execution came from Gandhi”. Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation…Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate”.

King still experienced racial issues however, when he started to fall in love with a white woman and had to break it off because of the heat felt from the race differences of the South. After Crozer, he completed a doctorate in philosophy at Boston University and met and married a woman named Coretta Scott and moved to Montgomery, Alabama and King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist church.

Resources:
A&E Biography: Martin Luther King Jr.: The Man and the Dream, VHS60 minutes. (New York: Black Audio Films, 1999).

Charles Osborne, ed., I Have A Dream (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), 16.

Lotte Hoskins, ed., I Have A Dream: The quotations of Martin Luther King Jr (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968), 125.

David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 25.

Jr Lerone Bennett, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1976), 29.