21 January 2019•Update: 22 January 2019
By Ahmet Salih Alacaci
ANKARA
U.S. civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Jan. 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia to a family of multiple generations of pastors.
Despite the institutionalized segregation in the pre-civil rights U.S., he pursued an extensive education in theological studies, receiving his doctorate degree in 1955, one year after starting as a pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
As a leading member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was a prominent figure in the nonviolent civil rights movement spanning the 1950s and 1960s.
King first rose to national consciousness at the end of 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycotts during which the city’s bus riders -- the majority of which were black -- protested its segregation laws in public transport.
As president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after the boycott's end, King made his mark with his commitment to nonviolence throughout the affair.
After eight years of efforts to achieve racial equality in the U.S., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial amid the pivotal "March on Washington", during which he made his famous speech: "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin."
As a champion of equal rights for all, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 1964, the same year of the U.S. Civil Rights Act which definitively prohibited racial segregation across the country.
However, racism and segregation could not be uprooted overnight and King did not back down from his cause.
In 1965, he along with thousands of marchers traveled on foot for three days from the town of Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, the state capital in a drive to register black voters.
The southern State of Alabama had a deeply entrenched racial discrimination legislation in place even after the civil rights act, and Governor George Wallace and other officials sought to prevent the registration of black people to be able to vote.
King and his associates marched 50 miles (80 kilometers) to reach the city amid harassment from local authorities and white vigilante groups in a movement that resulted in the registration of thousands of black voters, reform of voting laws in the state and national and international awareness on the issue.
Following the march, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson expressed solidarity with the cause, saying "it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."
King was assassinated in 1968 by a white supremacist while in Memphis Tennessee in support of Black public employees on strike for better wages and treatment.
Throughout his life, King fought for equal rights of all people, carrying the issue of racial discrimination into the human consciousness across his country and the globe.
