Martin Luthur King Jr: His Struggle to be Equal Cost Him his Life

He was an American civil rights advocate, preacher, and Nobel laureate who gained prominence in the 1950's and 1960's for his leadership in the fight to secure equal rights for Black Americans.
Born on January 15 1929 he attended Morehouse College at the age of 15 and was ordained a baptist minister at age 17. He graduated from Crozor Theological Seminary as class president in 1951 and did his post graduate work at Boston University. While there he became interested in the teachings of the famous non violent Indian protester Mohandas Gandhi. His ideas about non violent protest would influence King in his future conflicts with the white establishment in the following years.
In 1953 The Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education). The segregation that existed in many other aspects of life in the south would also be challenged by King in the wake of this decision.
In 1955 he organized a boycott of the public transportation system in Montgomery, Alabama (The famous bus boycotts in which Rosa Parks took part) to protest the unfair segregation that occurred as a matter of routine policy. During this time King was jailed, his life was threatened, and his home firebombed. The result of the year long protest was that The Supreme Court outlawed segregated busing in the city.
King decided that non violent protest would be the cornerstone of his approach and in light of his victory in Montgomery he took his fight for equality nationally.
In august of 1963 he led a famous March on Washington in a demand for equal rights during which he gave his memorable "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Monument before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. The following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts to promote civil rights.
His opposition to the War in Vietnam in the following years was received with mixed reactions by both blacks and whites in the country. King believed that as long as the Vietnam War raged that Americans would be too distracted to concern themselves with the plight of Black Americans here at home. Others believed his opposition to the war to be unpatriotic.
The turbulent year of 1968 arrived with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam occupying the attention of the nation. King, by this time, was receiving constant death threats and suffering from stress, exhaustion, and he began to allude to his own demise in his speeches. On April 3 1968 he gave a speech in which he said: "I have been to the mountain top and seen the Promised land. I may not get there with you but we as a people will get to the promised land."
The following day he was shot by an assassin while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. It is believed he was shot by a white man named James Earl Ray but at various times since the shooting Ray had both admitted and denied he did it. Martin Luther King's body was returned to Atlanta, Georgia where in the following days he was buried at a funeral that was attended by over 100,000 people. When he was killed he was only 39 years old. His birthday, January 15th, is now observed as a national holiday.