“Coming for a middle-class family of Southern black ministry, Martin Luther King Jr. was cultivated into a man of profound importance. He lived on Auburn Avenue, home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous black businesses and black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Growing up, King experienced prejudices common in the South. However, at the age six, when a white playmates parent banned him from contact with king, he recognized the start of something that went beyond the normal prejudices, the segregation of schools. In these early years King was closest to his grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken. When he got word of her fatal heart attack King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window, at the young age of 12. When I saw this fact, I felt comforted knowing that King himself had struggles makes him feel more relatable to me, almost as if I know he is not “invincible” or “perfect” per say, which assists me in believing that anyone, anywhere, is able to become someone of high magnitude.
King entered Morehouse College at 15 after skipping two years of High School. He spent the summer before college on a tobacco farm in Connecticut that revealed race relations outside the segregated South. Witnessing how peacefully the races mixed in the North intensely deepened his hatred of racial segregation. I admire his courage for switching to ministry after studying in medicine and law. King’s mentor at college was president Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist who encouraged King to join alongside him in the confrontation of racial inequality. Mays alleged the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression. In addition he criticized the black church’s emphasis on not being in the present day, which nudged them into social action. Once he graduated, he spent 3 years in Pennsylvania, where he became infatuated with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951, elected president of Crozer’s student body, composed almost entirely of white students. Lastly, he received a doctorate in the study of man’s relationship to God.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott effectively launched King's career as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement to end racial segregation and discrimination in America. Being new to town, and thus not yet implicated in local political rivalries Martin was elected president of the Association. I learned that both his charisma as a speaker, and his authority and intelligence assisted him in success. The speed with which people responded to King probably reflected how hungry the Civil Rights Movement was for a leader, a symbol, a figurehead–someone to articulate the hopes and dreams behind actions, and hence give chaos to order.
So much of my knowledge