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Parents: The Reverend and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr.
Home: 501 Auburn Avenue, N.E., Atlanta, Georgia. -
Graduates from Morehouse College and enters Crozer Theological Seminary. Ordained to the Baptist ministry, February 25, 1948, at age 19.
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Graduates from Morehouse College and enters Crozer Theological Seminary. Ordained to the Baptist ministry, February 25, 1948, at age 19.
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King begins his studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.
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King graduates from Crozer with a bachelor of divinity degree, delivering the valedictory address at commencement.
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King and Coretta Scott are married at the Scott home near Marion, Alabama.
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King begins his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
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Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to vacate her seat and move to the rear of a city bus in Montgomery to make way for a white passenger. Jo Ann Robinson and other Women’s Political Council members mimeograph thousands of leaflets calling for a one-day boycott of the city’s buses on Monday, 5 December.
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On November 13, the Supreme Court rules that bus segregation is illegal, ensuring victory for the boycott.
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Southern black ministers meet in Atlanta to share strategies in the fight against segregation. King is named chairman of the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration (later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC).
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King moves from Montgomery to Atlanta to devote more time to SCLC and the freedom struggle. He becomes assistant pastor to his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
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King is arrested during a sit-in demonstration at Rich’s department store in Atlanta. He is sentenced to four months hard labor for violating a suspended sentence he received for a 1956 traffic violation. He is released on $2000 bond on 27 October.
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Responding to eight Jewish and Christian clergymen’s advice that African Americans wait patiently for justice, King pens his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." King and Abernathy were arrested on 12 April and released on 19 April.
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In an event that will become known as "Bloody Sunday," voting rights marchers are beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama as they attempt to march to Montgomery.
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King, Floyd McKissick of CORE, and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC resume James Meredith’s "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, after Meredith was shot and wounded near Memphis.
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On November 27, King announces the inception of the Poor People's Campaign focusing on jobs and freedom for the poor of all races
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King is shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.