Martin Luther King Jr
Jared Pendleton
5 Facts
- King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which is what (SCLC) stands for, in 1957, serving as its first president.
- Helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response.
- King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
- He was assassinated on April 4th, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee after planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C, to be called the "Poor Peoples Campaign."
He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.