Basic Information
Name: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nickname: Mike (yup, really); MLK; Dr. King; The King
Born: January 15th, 1929
Died: April 4th, 1968
Nationality: American
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Clergyman, civil rights leader, philosopher, author, martyr (you can only do that once)
Education: Morehouse College: B.A., sociology; Crozer Theological Seminary: B.Div.; Boston University: Ph.D., systematic theology
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Martin Luther King, Sr. & Alberta Williams King
Siblings: Willie Christine King Farris, Alfred Daniel Williams King
Spouse(s): Coretta Scott King
Children: Yolanda Denis King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, Bernice Albertine King
Friends: Ralph Abernathy, other members of the SCLC, Lyndon Johnson, Gandhi (y'know, in spirit), quite a few paramours (y'know, in the flesh)
Foes: Bull Connor, Laurie Pritchett, Joseph Smitherman, Richard J. Daley, Henry Loeb, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, James Earl Ray, the Vietnam War, the Black Power movement (sorta), racism, poverty
Analysis
The Doctor Is In
Look out, America: you've got a sickness, and there's a doctor in the house.
The sickness is racism. Segregation. Violence. The doctor is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—yes, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And, easy, Shmoopers: he puts his pants on just like the rest of us, one leg at a time.
Except, once his pants are on, he leads the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, wins a Nobel Peace Prize, and becomes a world-historical figure and a symbol of human freedom, dignity, and understanding. And he's here to cut that racism right out of you. Nonviolently, of course.
Let's find out more.
I'm a Doctor, Not a…Doctor
Maybe we should start by clearing up a bit of confusion: Dr. King was not a medical doctor. He was almost a medical doctor. Or at least he wanted to be. For a while. He had a thing for healing from early on.
King's interest in medicine was partly just the product of being a typical young person: his family tree was chock-full of Baptist ministers, and everyone pretty much assumed he would end up being one. Like the kid who wants to do absolutely anything except join the family business, young MLK wasn't interested. He thought the ministry was for mediocre intellects, which was basically dissing his whole gene pool (oops), but hey, at least he didn't have a self-esteem problem (source).
In fact, young MLK wasn't just skeptical of the ministry. In fact, as a teenager, he was the terror of his Sunday school class. Once, he straight-up denied the resurrection of Jesus. For a Baptist, it doesn't get more skeptical than that.
Young MLK was steeped in Christianity, it's true, but he didn't just absorb it thoughtlessly and become Yet Another King Preacher. He was an independent and highly discerning thinker from an early age; it was on his own terms that he eventually came to believe that "behind the legends and myths of the [Bible] were many profound truths which one could not escape" (source).
What he eventually realized was that religion didn't have to be just some fusty old set of weird rules and kooky inexplicable gaga visions, but a potent force for goodness and justice on the actual living, breathing Earth.
He liked that.
Preacher Man
So he decided to enter the ministry. He was ordained shortly before graduating from Morehouse College, at which point he picked up a couple more degrees. From 1948 to 1951, King studied divinity at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Alas, it no longer exists as such, so those of you who thought it would be cool to repeat Dr. K's education yourself as some kind of performance art are out of luck.
While he was at Crozer, King's mentor, preacher J. Pius Barbour, took him to a presentation on pacifism by a guy named A.J. Muste. Muste, as it turns out, was a mentor of Bayard Rustin's; more on him in a moment. (Also, for yet more Rustin, you simply muste visit our "Compare and Contrast" section.)
So this was the moment that King discovered his calling to nonviolence, right?
Actually, nope. He was skeptical at first. It just goes to show that towering historical figures are people too, and they go through periods of trying to figure out who they are just like anyone else. The world's most famous preacher of nonviolence started out as neither a preacher nor a very strong believer in nonviolence as a tool for political change.
As we all know, two degrees is simply not enough for an intellectually voracious young fellow. Even Kevin Bacon has six. So having graduated from Crozer as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., MLK went off to Boston University, where he became the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. You really never can have too many honorifics.
From 1951–1955, King completed his doctorate in the BU School of Theology and, on school holidays, preached at his father's (eventually his) church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. He also married Coretta Scott, who was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. And how's this for smooth: while they were dating, MLK told Coretta she had "everything I have ever wanted in a wife" (source).
It's a Family Affair
By this point in his life, MLK had a pretty solid sense of his own theology and what he wanted to do with it. You would hope so after studying the stuff for eight years. He also had practical oratorical experience from preaching in Papa King's pulpit. What do you get when you combine a big-brained dude with fantastic public speaking skills? Someone very convincing, that's what.
King's speaking skills came into play very soon. So did another part of the King family legacy: activism.
Dr. K had grown up in a family that Did Stuff About Stuff. His maternal grandfather helped create the Atlanta NAACP after the city government refused to fund construction of a Black high school. When a local newspaper called the activists "dirty and ignorant," Black Atlantans flat-out stopped reading it. It was a boycott.
And that was the end of that paper (source).
"Hey," you might be thinking, "boycotts—that's exactly the kind of thing Dr. K talks about in 'Mountaintop'!" Gold star for you.
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company […]? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. (24.1–5)
King's family knew a thing or two about boycotts. He ended his civil rights career calling for a boycott. And he started it that way, too.
Faster Than a Speeding Bus
The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 really kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. It was also the event that made MLK MLK.
King moved to Montgomery with Coretta after accepting a job as pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Shortly thereafter, local Black leaders organized the bus boycott in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks; they chose Dr. K to lead their newly formed organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association, after hearing him speak at one of their meetings.
He was 26.
Now, we might like to imagine our young reverend spoke so brilliantly that everyone started cheering and throwing confetti and lifted him on their shoulders and that was that. Which is not entirely wrong, as you'll discover if you read or listen to the Holt Street Baptist Church speech. It actually sounds a whole lot like "Mountaintop," which we'll talk about more in a sec. Bottom line, it's a good MLK speech, and it shows just how precocious and consistent his views were on the relationship between Black people and America.
But that's not the whole reason King was chosen as leader.
He was also kind of a scapegoat. You know how when you and a group of classmates all need to ask the teacher for more time on an assignment? Who would be the better spokesperson: someone the teacher doesn't like or someone the teacher doesn't really know?
That's how MLK got picked. Being the new kid in town, he wasn't on the radar of the white Montgomery establishment, so he hadn't yet had a chance to be intimidated. He was still young and optimistic. Basically, MLK fit his own description of Rosa Parks: he was "a person that nobody [could] call a disturbing factor in the community" (source).
Not yet, anyway.
Back to the Future
As leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, MLK drew support from Montgomery's Black churches, coordinated various efforts, and tried to gather support from white allies as well.
He was super lucky, professionally speaking. From almost the very beginning of his very first ministerial job, he got to do the thing that was his reason for joining the church in the first place: making people's lives better.Not just their spiritual ones, but their earthly ones. Maybe you remember that spot in "Mountaintop" where Dr. King says this:
It's all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all of its symbolism, but ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and His children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. (21.6–8)
Well, he literally practiced what he literally preached.
The Montgomery bus boycott also made King something else very MLK-y: a staunch advocate of nonviolence. Not that he didn't already dig nonviolence. In his Holt Street speech, Dr. K reminds the audience that "we are not here advocating violence. […] The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest" (source).
But you'll notice he refers to nonviolent protest as a "weapon." King's understanding of nonviolence wasn't all kisses and cuddles by any means. Check out his defense of the boycotters' cause, which combines religion with activism:
[…] justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love. […] The Almighty God himself is […] not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, "I love you, Israel." He's also the God that stands up before the nations and said: "Be still and know that I'm God, that if you don't obey me I will break the backbone of your power, and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships." Standing beside love is always justice[,] and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion but we've come to see that we've got to use the tools of coercion. Not only is this thing a process of education but it is also a process of legislation. (Source)
Breaking backbones? Slapping out of orbit? Dang.
Dr. K tells his audience to turn the other cheek, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Inside, they're slapping back in the name of justice, which is a kind of love in disguise.
It's Getting Mahatma in Here
Transforming your culture takes more than passive nonviolence. It needs to be active. It needs to be activist. It needs to change minds. And pass legislation.
Lo and behold, it was during the bus boycott that King was tutored in activist nonviolence by a seasoned specialist in Gandhian tactics, Bayard Rustin. MLK already believed that, as a preacher, he had a responsibility to materially improve people's lives. Under Bayard Rustin's tutelage, he decided how that should be done.
As Rustin said, "The glorious thing is that [King] came to a profoundly deep understanding of nonviolence through the struggle itself, and through reading and discussions which he had in the process of carrying on the protest" (source).
50% More Free; or, Why There's an MLK Day
The Montgomery-era King also riffs on yet another of his future favorite themes: freedom. He tells his audience they should feel fortunate to live in a place where nonviolent protest is possible:
If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn't do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn't do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. (Source)
Which sounds very familiar…oh, right—"Mountaintop":
If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they haven't committed themselves to that over there. But […] Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. (19.6–8, 11)
Hmm.
MLK read that all that stuff in the First Amendment. But he also read it…in his own speech. From 13 years earlier. "Mountaintop" was impromptu, so King repurposed this earlier material for the situation in Memphis. There's actually lots of overlap between these two speeches, which we encourage you to hunt for. We promise it won't be on the exam.
Note how Dr. K suggests in these speeches that there are limits to nonviolent activism. Under an oppressive government, it ain't gonna work. You'll just be put in jail (like, permanently) or shot dead (also permanently).
King would grapple more and more with the limits of nonviolence in the years to come. But he recognized that he could be the leader he wanted to be because of freedoms he had. These passages exemplify another of MLK's most notable traits, which was his belief in the fundamental goodness of a deeply flawed country.
America—basically meaning, at this point, white-controlled America—had a lot of problems. Especially if you were Black. But King believed that the idea of America was good and that America itself was finally good. Slavery and segregation and racism and all that were not an essential building block of a profoundly rotten society, but a big, nasty error that could be corrected.
Not everyone saw things exactly the same way, and not everyone does today. But it's a big reason why MLK is our country's favorite—that is, most politically acceptable—civil rights hero: he believed in America.
Forward to the Past: Dreamtime
Okay, whew. So, let's review: so far, we've seen how MLK…
- became a preacher,
- devoted himself to making the world a better place,
- decided nonviolence was the way to do it,
- got some leadership experience,
- thought God was on his side,
- believed in American ideals of equality and liberty and justice for all,
- and believed that citizens have the power and responsibility "to make America what it ought to be" (31.3).
Like we said: whew. Seriously, if you haven't taken a bathroom break yet, reward yourself. And bring us a soft pretzel while you're up.
At this point, we're going to skip ahead and say that A Lot of Stuff Happened. Go read about it if you want.
Basically, King took everything he learned in Montgomery and, along with the rest of the SCLC (which was founded in the wake of the bus boycott), applied it around the South. Albany, Birmingham, Selma, all that. Along the way, he forged ties with other groups who were fighting for various causes, like labor unions and decolonization efforts in Africa and elsewhere (source).
The one big event we will pause and squint at while stroking our chins and saying "hmm" is the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a.k.a. that big mosh pit on the National Mall where Dr. K gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Now, as you well know, "I Have a Dream" is by far MLK's most celebrated speech—his best known, best loved, and most likely to be turned into a meme, which is how you know you've really made it. "I Have a Dream" summarizes everything a whole lot of people love about MLK. Here's the moment that gets by far the most play:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (Source)
Like so many famous sayings, this statement is used to support all kinds of views. In discussions of race on the internet (or really anywhere), the probability that someone will refer to it approaches 100%.
But, between you and us, it's often read too broadly. All MLK says here is that individual people shouldn't be judged based on race—not that society should ignore race altogether and never address it in any public way.
As "I've Been to the Mountaintop" shows us, King certainly didn't believe that. He wasn't interested in ignoring history and pretending everyone was exactly the same. At the same time, he did, at least during "I Have a Dream," seem to hope and believe and, okay, let's say it, dream that one day, maybe unfathomably far in the future, we'll all be able to transcend race (whatever that might mean) and live happily ever after.
Whatever the case, just because MLK shared his dream doesn't mean he wasn't hip to its pitfalls and complexities. It's just that pitfalls and complexities don't make for a very inspiring speech. And he wanted to be inspiring, because he really did believe in the Dream, as difficult as it can sometimes be for us to believe.
Still, in the minds of many people, Dr. K stood and stands almost exclusively for one thing: a post-racial America. No one back then thought of America as post-racial (we mean, please), but there were plenty of people who thought Dr. K's philosophy of nonviolence and brotherhood meant getting too cozy with the oppressors, i.e., white people.
There's more info on this in Compare and Contrast and in the Black Power Glossary and Timeline entries. But the gist of it is that some African American activists thought King's methods weren't getting far enough fast enough and didn't push back hard enough against the serious abuses white America was still perpetrating on Black America. Black nonviolence, they believed, was a submissive ideology just begging to be steamrolled by white violence.
King in the North
After his major civil rights victories in the South, MLK set his sights on the similar-but-different injustices happening in the North. In January 1966, he and his wife moved into a rundown tenement in Chicago to make that city the next stop on his nonviolent protest train. Prejudice up North was exercised in sneakier, less public ways—no dogs and fire hoses to spark national outrage. Instead, discriminatory real estate sales practices called "redlining" kept Blacks confined in neighborhoods no less segregated than the Jim Crow south.
King believed that "If we can break the system in Chicago, it can be broken any place in the country" (source).
This did not go well.
There were a few reasons for that:
For one thing, Mayor Richard J. Daley was a crafty opponent who was good at countering MLK's usual methods. And Northern African Americans were more economically and politically diverse than in the South, which meant a lesser sense of shared cause to rally around.
During the summer, King led a series of marches into all-white neighborhoods where marchers were often set upon with bricks and bottles. King himself got knocked down by a rock during a march in Marquette Park. "I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate," he concluded (source).
The marches didn't accomplish much except an agreement between Mayor Daley and King's people to look into some of the issues important to the marchers.
Hoover Makes Like a Hoover and…Does That Thing Vacuums Do
MLK's reputation as an effective leader was waning, and Black Power/Black nationalist folks like the Black Panthers began filling his niche. King even started to wonder if his way of doing things had become a pipe dream. Maybe a turn to violence was inevitable. As he said following that debacle with the Invaders in Memphis, "Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here. And maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course" (source).
Whether he thought violence would somehow self-correct we don't know. But we do know from "I've Been to the Mountaintop" that he never stopped preaching nonviolence.
Also making MLK's life a nightmare during his later years was the FBI. As King rose to prominence as a big-time disruptor of the status quo, he caught the Bureau's attention. He got their full attention when he dared to question whether the FBI was doing its absolute best to investigate Bad Things Happening To Black People down South.
Acting with the approval of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, peeper-in-chief and certified weirdo FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed King under surveillance. "Oh, so he tapped Dr. K's phone and heard a bunch of boring conversations about plane tickets and meetings and nonviolence this that and the other, right?"
Eh…not exactly.
We'll put this as delicately as possible. Dr. K traveled a lot. He was under stress a lot. He was away from his family. A lot. His wife, specifically. Things…transpired…in motel rooms. And the FBI taped it.
Yes, that is icky.
The Bureau reportedly offered these tapes to the press in an effort to ruin King's reputation. They even sent King an anonymous letter threatening to blackmail him and suggesting, as he saw it, that he commit suicide.
This was all in addition to infiltrating the SCLC, attempting to sabotage their nonviolent operations, feeding defamatory stories to the press, and neglecting to inform King about known threats to his life. There's a word for these people, and we're not allowed to use it.
Meanies.
It's Not Easy Not Having Green
Still, MLK pressed on.
In 1967, he began to publicly oppose the Vietnam War at the risk of alienating President Lyndon Johnson, who'd been an important force in pushing through civil rights legislation.
Dr. K also became increasingly invested in fixing economic disparities: "Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality" (source). He supported the idea of a "multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro"—what we would call reparations—to balance out those minor inconveniences (centuries of slavery, etc.) imposed on African Americans:
Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races. (Source)
We'll come back to that last bit in a moment. Here's another thing King said about cold, hard cash: "And I'll tell you, if America doesn't use its vast resources and wealth to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor nations and between the rich and the poor in this nation, it […] is going to hell" (source).
Hey, Dr. K—tell us what you really think.
It's no accident that King the economic agitator is much less well known to people today than King the nonviolent soldier for civil rights. We'll let him explain why:
It didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters. It didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. But now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars. (Source)
There was, of course, money spent to integrate lunch counters and secure the right to vote—namely, the money spent on police trying to shut it all down. But MLK's point is on point: it's easy to be in favor of equality when it doesn't cost anything. Bring up money and you find yourself in a ghost town.
A Man for All Colors
Finally, as we saw in the quotation above, King wanted economic equality for all the poor. His Poor People's Campaign was conceived to include everyone. The Black nationalists definitely didn't care for this, but neither did some members of the SCLC, and for the same reason: they saw it as a betrayal of Black-specific causes.
Not that the SCLC had it in for other people. They just figured African Americans faced a particular set of issues for historically distinctive reasons and thought the SCLC should stick to that. But, contrary to what some people might have thought, King never did abandon his concern for the plight of African Americans as a group. His plan to boycott racist companies and strengthen Black institutions in "I've Been to the Mountaintop" is a testament to that.
Dr. K had a capacious brain. He could fit a lot in there at once. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Maybe caring about everyone isn't opposed to caring about a specific group. Maybe sometimes it is. Either way, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a first-rate intelligence.
King of the Mountain
That's not to say he was perfect, of course. He wasn't. He had faults. Like his thing with all those non-Coretta ladies, which, thanks to a little thing called the seventh Commandment (if not, y'know, regular old guilt), he surely believed was wrong.
Later on, even some of his allies sometimes wondered if he was more devoted to nonviolence than he was to the success of any given project. If Malcolm X wanted to secure African Americans' rights "by any means necessary," maybe King was too fixated on maintaining nonviolence by any means necessary. But maybe not, since he leveled a similar charge at white America: "large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity" (source).
Whether or not he was being eclipsed by more radical leaders, his assassination on April 4th, 1968 sent shockwaves throughout the nation and across the world. The devastation and despair of African American communities in American cities exploded with riots in scores of cities in the wake of King's murder.
President Johnson used the opportunity to push Congress to pass the civil rights legislation that was on the table, aimed at procuring fair housing for Black Americans. A week after King's death, Johnson had his Fair Housing Act.
What Ifs
In any case, our country will sadly never know precisely what it lost the evening Dr. King was assassinated. We know he didn't fear the reaper. As for the rest, we can only guess.
And we do guess, a lot. Go online and you'll find reams—reams—of articles asking, what would MLK think about x? "What would MLK think about race relations in today's America?" "What would MLK think about this or that civil rights issue?" "What would MLK think about thin crust versus deep dish?" We should probably all just give in and get WWMLKJD bracelets/bumper stickers / tattoos and be done with it.
We ask WWMLKJD so much because we can't know the answer(s), and because our view of MLK still isn't entirely clear. Ironically, that's partly because we often simplify his views to suit our needs. Dr. K is a popular rhetorical tool, but, depending on the point we're trying to make, invoking him can be controversial.
For example, because of his pacifism and emphasis on universal love and liberty, King is widely regarded by white America as the friendliest, least threatening, and therefore greatest major civil rights leader—the perfect Black man. The most inflammatory use of MLK is undoubtedly when people, especially white people, use him to suggest that today's African Americans are somehow out of step with his ideals and therefore out of line.
That one, just…don't.
Whatever mistakes we might make in interpreting King's legacy, the fact remains that we constantly turn to him. We shower him with awards and tributes—the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), MLK Day (1983), the Congressional Gold Medal (2004), a national memorial in Washington, DC (2011)—possibly to convince ourselves that we are the country he wanted us to be. Or that we're at least trying. As if revering him will somehow finish the work he set out to do.
Maybe. We'll see.
For now, whether we completely agree with King or not, we celebrate him for fighting for a world in which his beliefs are possible. Whatever he was right about, whatever he was wrong about, he had something—an authority, a presence, a dream—that we, as a nation, still long for after all these years.