the bird on fire

By Middle-School Blogger Sophia Bottine

Welcome to Black History Month. Last January 20th was more than the “3” in a 3-day weekend. It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday we were commemorating. Sophia set to work back then to better understand the man, the leader, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Here’s what she found.

Martin Luther King, Jr., son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Alberta King, a former schoolteacher, was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta. 

In his early years, he went to Yonge Street Elementary School and later went on to Booker T. Washington High School, where he joined the debate team. He quickly developed a reputation for his powerful public speaking skills and his voice, which was said to be very deep. 

Then, at just 15, he left his high school and went to Morehouse College, an all-male school. 

While he was at Morehouse, he took classes in medicine and law but changed to ministry in his senior year when his father told him to (Britannica.com). King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948. For the next three years, King attended Crozer Theological Seminary, located in Upland, Pennsylvania, and became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence (Britannica.com). In 1951, he got a bachelor’s degree in divinity. After Crozer, he attended Boston University and studied man’s relationship to God, which got him a doctorate for a dissertation titled, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman” (Britannica.com).

After King finished his studies, he returned to the South and became a pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Shortly after he returned, Rosa Parks made history when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. Inspired by this, King staged an extremely successful boycott of the Montgomery buses. Then, after a year, on November 13, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was illegal making the bus boycott successful. 

King later formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC in 1957 to fight segregation and gain civil rights (Britannica.com). He had decided that it was time to take a stand to make things right! In 1958, U.S. Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since the reconstruction. In that same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., is almost assassinated when Izola Ware Curry, a 42-year-old woman, stabs him with a letter opener as he is signing copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom, in Harlem, New York (kinginstitute.standord.edu).

Now skipping a bit ahead to 1961, in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission bans segregation in interstate travel. In the same year, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) began the first Freedom Ride through the South, in a Greyhound bus. Martin Luther King, Jr., then gets arrested two times, once in 1962 and the other in 1963 for protesting segregation in public parks and other facilities. He was cited for demonstrating without a permit (rownak.com).

During his subsequent time in the Birmingham Jail, he writes his famous letter called “The Negro is Your Brother.” This letter responding to the “A Call for Unity” clergymen who had published a letter criticizing King’s efforts (niotbn.squarespace.com). That same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., leads 125,000 people down a Freedom Walk in Detroit, President Kennedy gets assassinated, and King makes his “I Have a Dream” speech–which is his most famous speech.

In the next five years, MLK accomplishes many many things and gets arrested a few more times, until he gets shot as he is standing on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A few days later on April 9 a funeral was held in his honor. And within a week of the assassination, the Open Housing Act is passed by Congress. Finally, in 1986 on November 2, the Martin Luther King Holiday was made honoring the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize (NobelPrize.org).