Martin Luther King Jr.: What We Can Learn From Him Today

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929. He was the eldest son of a Baptist minister, and the grandson of the founder of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father served as a pastor. When Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted his first job as a pastor in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954, he found a black community that had long-standing resentments over the mistreatment of black passengers on the city‘s segregated buses. After the arrest of Rosa Parks in November 1955, King was chosen as president of the protest organization. In 1961, King joined with other local ministers to organize nonviolent protest campaigns against segregation laws in the South. In the spring of 1963, mass demonstrations of teenagers and schoolchildren in Birmingham, Alabama, were attacked by police dogs and high-pressured hoses. Hundreds were arrested, including King. King‘s response to local white clergymen who criticized the protests was the Letter from a Birmingham City Jail, which he wrote while he was in prison, on April 16, 1963