Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael, renamed after his father's trip to Germany
The boy born in Atlanta in 1929 was Michael King Jr. In 1934 his father, a Baptist pastor, travelled to a church congress in Berlin, toured sites linked to the reformer Martin Luther, and came home to rename himself and his five-year-old son. The new name would become one of history's most famous.
King grew up above his grandparents' home, the second of three children, in a family built around Ebenezer Baptist Church. His father took over as senior pastor in 1931 and grew the congregation from about six hundred to several thousand. The 1934 Baptist World Alliance meeting he attended in Berlin passed a resolution condemning racial hatred and discrimination against Jews and people of colour, a pointed statement as Nazism rose.
Racism reached King early. At about six, the white friend he played with went to a separate school, and the boy's parents then banned the friendship outright. King later said this first made him want to hate white people, while his parents told him Christian duty required loving everyone. He watched his father refuse to move to the back of a shoe shop and correct a police officer who called him boy. At 15, returning by bus from winning a speaking contest, he was forced to stand for white passengers, a night he called the angriest of his life.
He was a precocious, sociable teenager: fond of opera and dictionaries, weak at spelling, nicknamed Tweed for his suits, known as a superb jitterbug dancer. At 13 he startled his Sunday school by denying the bodily resurrection. Wartime enlistment emptied colleges, so Morehouse began admitting high school juniors, and he enrolled there in 1944 aged 15.
From 1955 he led the Montgomery bus boycott, became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at the 1963 March on Washington and helped organise the Selma marches. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed, and he won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on him and mailed him a threatening anonymous letter. He was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while planning the Poor People's Campaign; the federal holiday in his name was first observed in 1986.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr.
