Martin Luther King Jr.
Led the movement that ended legal segregation in America and was killed at 39
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister, entered Morehouse College at 15 and completed a doctorate at Boston University. In 1954 he took a pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, planning a quiet ministry. A year later Rosa Parks was arrested and local leaders chose him, as a newcomer with no enemies, to lead the bus boycott. He was 26. His house was bombed with his wife and baby inside; the boycott lasted 381 days and won.
The years that followed included as many failures as triumphs. He was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener in 1958 by a mentally ill woman. A 1962 campaign in Albany, Georgia, ended without any gains. In Birmingham in 1963 he was jailed and wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in the margins of a newspaper, answering white clergy who had urged patience. The March on Washington that August, and his speech there, helped push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Selma in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act. He won the Nobel Peace Prize at 35.
The FBI tapped his phones, recorded his affairs and sent him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself. When he opposed the Vietnam War in 1967 many former allies turned on him, and his campaign against poverty in northern cities struggled.
He was shot dead on a motel balcony in Memphis on 4 April 1968, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.