I have a dream

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It's the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., (books by this author) born in Atlanta (1929). The leader of the Civil Rights Movement, King was a powerful speaker and strong leader even during his younger years. After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta, King was urged by his father, who was a Baptist preacher, to enter the ministry. He enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he worked toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree.

While at the seminary, King was elected president of the student body, which was almost exclusively white. A Crozer professor wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, "The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation."

It was 1955, early in King's new tenure as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on one of that city's busses. King was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was formed with the intention of boycotting the transit system. He was young, only 26, and he knew his family connections and professional standing would help him find another pastorate should the boycott fail. So he accepted.

In his first speech to the group as its president, King said: "We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."

The boycott worked, and King saw the opportunity for more change. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which provided him a national platform. For the next 13 years, King worked to peacefully end segregation. In 1963, he joined other civil rights leaders in the March on Washington—that's where he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The following year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and King earned the Nobel Prize for Peace. In his acceptance speech for that prize he said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, was assassinated almost four years later, in Memphis. He was there to support a strike by the city's sanitation workers, and had told them the night before a sniper shot him dead on his hotel-room balcony: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

From the Writer's Almanac