Family and background

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia (on 501 Auburn Avenue) to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. (Birth records for Martin Luther King Jr. list his name as Michael.) He graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948. At Morehouse, King was mentored by President Benjamin Mays, a civil rights leader. Later he graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. in Systematic theology from Boston University .

King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953. King's father performed the wedding ceremony in Scott's parents' house in Marion, Alabama .

King and Scott had four children:

    * Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)

    * Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)

    * Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)

    * Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)

All four children have followed their father's footsteps as civil rights activists, although their own issues and opinions differ.

King's wife, Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006.

Civil rights activism

In 1953, King became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was only twenty four years old. He appears to have learned from the successes and failures of other civil rights movements in the South at the time. For example, on November 27, 1955, he hosted a speech in Montgomery by Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The speech dealt with recent Mississippi murders of blacks, including those of George W. Lee and Emmett Till. Since 1951, Howard had headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a civil rights/self-organization which had organized a successful boycott of service stations which refused to provide restrooms for blacks.