Martin Luther King Jr.: Time's Man of the Year

MLK was born on January 15th, 1929. At the age of 12, MLK actually tried commiting suicide. After he came home from a parade, that his parents told him that he WASN'T allowed to attend, he returned to find that his grandmother had died in his absence. He then climbed out the 2nd story window of his home and jumped. He was only minorly injured. MLK skipped 2 grades in highschool, 9th and 11th. He entered Moorehouse College at the age of 15 in 1944 and by 19 he graduatedwith a bachelors degree in sociology. He ended up becoming a baptist minister who later became a civil rights activists early in his career. MLK married Coretta Scott and had 4 kids: Yolanda, MLK the 3rd, Dexter, and Bernice. His honeymoon was spent in a funeral parlor because his friend owned it and offered to let him use it. MLK led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which his house was bombed. He also organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. Along with that, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington where he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. It is also where he established his reputation as one of the greatest public speakers in American history. October 14th, 1964 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for battling racial inequality through nonviolence. To this day, he is still the youngest male to receive the prize at the age of 35. King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was then followed by riots in many US cities. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was also murdered. She was killed while attending church in Atlanta in 1974 by a 23 year old man named Marcus Wayne Chenault. He shot and killed Alberta while she was playing the organ in front of the church. By: Aubree Cuip MLK was Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" in the year of 1963. In total however, he has been on the cover 5 times. He has also been listen in Time's "100 People of the 20th Century". This is an excerpt from the article in Time's magazine called "King's Last March" and it was written about 2 weeks after Kings death: "The march King led in death through Atlanta proved grander- both in attendance and dedication to his ideals- than any he had led in life. Fully 200,000 Americans, black and white, walked the sun beaten streets of the Peach State's capital in temperatures that reached 82 degrees F." Time Magazine also wrote that MLK was the personification of the civil rights movement. He was seeking to transform his anger against a segregated and hateful world, he found a weapon in Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent resistence. Such qualities of a man are major reasons as to why MLK was named 1963's Time Man of the Year.