Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. He entered Morehouse College at 15, trained for the ministry at Crozer Theological Seminary and earned a doctorate in theology at Boston University in 1955. A university review in 1991 found that parts of his dissertation were plagiarized.

As a young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the 1955 bus boycott that began after the arrest of Rosa Parks. He then helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led nonviolent campaigns against segregation across the South. He wrote "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in 1963 and gave the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington that year. In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The FBI watched him closely and tried to discredit him.

On April 4, 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998) is not a book he wrote himself. The historian Clayborne Carson assembled it from his writings, letters and speeches to tell his life in his own words.