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Martin Luther King was born. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a son of a baptist minister.
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Martin Luther King attended Morehouse College. He attended there to boost enrollment by admitting promising highschool students like himself. Before going to college, King spent that summer on a tobacco farm in connecticut.
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King graduated from MoreHouse College with a bachelor's degree (he started attending this college in 1944).
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Martin Luther King is chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association. This association was formed by black people to lead a boycott of the segregated city buses. This boycott comes about after a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and got arrested. In response, king leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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Martin Luther King and other activists established a group later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It is formed to help local organizations carry out civil rights activists in the South.
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King and his family moved to his native city, Atlanta. Once there, he became a co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. At this post King devotes most of his time to SCLC and the civil rights movement.
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MLK wrote what is known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. King had participated in a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, to end segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practices. Police had turned dogs and fire hoses on the protesters, and King had been arrested along with a large number of his supporters. In the Birmingham jail, King writes an open letter to his fellow clergymen explaining his philosophy of nonviolence and why he would continue to protest.
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Martin Luther King delivered a speech called “I have a dream”.
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King was 35 at the time. Martin Luther King won a nobel prize. He was awarded because of his nonviolent resistance to racial prejustice. King was the youngest person to ever win a nobel prize.
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On this day, King was in Tennessee to help support a Sanitation workers’ strike.
At Memphis
At 6:05PM, MLK was fatally shot on the 2nd floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel. King was rushed to the hospital and later died. James Earl Ray was responsible for shooting MLK and was convicted.