Dr. King's Enduring Legacy

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was the driving force and conscience behind the civil rights revolution that broke down the walls of legal segregation in America.

Born and raised in the segregated South as the son of a Baptist minister, King chose to follow in his father's footsteps. He was a young and relatively unknown pastor at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala., when he was suddenly thrust into his rendezvous with destiny.

In December 1955 a Montgomery woman named Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. In response, King organized and led a prolonged boycott of city buses.

The success of the Montgomery boycott made King a national hero, and it sparked the campaign of nonviolent confrontation that became the hallmark of the civil rights movement as it spread across the South.

King's eloquent leadership of that movement reached a high-water mark at the time of the historic March on Washington in August 1963 when he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

In 1964, Congress passed a comprehensive Civil Rights Law that, in effect, brought an end to legal segregation throughout the land; that same year King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the years that followed, King expanded his campaign from social concerns to economic issues, and in the spring of 1968 he went to Memphis to lend his support to striking sanitation workers. There that he was gunned down by an assassin's bullet. At the age of 39, he became an enduring martyr in the long struggle for freedom and justice.