Martin Luther King
His Early Years
Early Life
- He was born on January 15th 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia
- His father was a baptist
- His mother was a school teacher
- He was a middle child, between an older sister, Willie King, and a younger brother, Alfred King.
- Was unsure about Christianity, but decided it has "many profound truths which one cannot escape" and became a Christian.
- He attended Booker T. Washington High School.
- He skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grade and entered Morehouse College at fifteen without graduating from high school.
- In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor Of Divinity degree in 1951.
- He married Coretta Scott on 18th June 1953.
- They had four children, Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.
- He first achieved national renown when he helped mobilise the black boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955. This was organised after Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.