How Much Do You Know About Martin Luther King Jr.?

After marching alongside 25,000 others from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, King delivered a speech known as “Our God Is Marching On!” on March 25, 1965. The speech took place at the Alabama State Capitol, below the window of segregationist Governor George Wallace, and featured a powerful “How long? Not long” call and response section.

It wasn’t until 1977, nine years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, that he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The honor was given by President Jimmy Carter and accepted by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. During the ceremony, Carter deemed King the “conscience of a generation,” stating that he “made our nation stronger because he made it better.”

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to hundreds of people at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. The speech took place the day before King was assassinated at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel. In his final speech, King seemed to predict his own fate. He told the crowd he was not concerned with longevity and he was not afraid, as long as he was doing God’s will to fight for equality.

The Stone of Hope sculpture stands 30 feet tall at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. Commissioned by King’s college fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, in 1996, the memorial bears a line from his famed “I Have a Dream” speech: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” The line gave the sculpture its name.

Martin Luther King Jr. was among the 60 Black ministers who gathered to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. The group originally formed to organize more protests like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, with the broader mission of ending racial segregation. Since its foundation, the SCLC has continued to fight for equality and expanded its attention to social problems such as poverty and war.

Many civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, drew influence and inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau wrote it after he was imprisoned for protesting slavery by refusing to pay his poll tax. The essay introduced the idea of refusing to obey a law that is unjust as a means of protest, without resorting to violence.

Martin Luther King Jr. was accepted at Morehouse College in his native city of Atlanta, Georgia, at the young age of 15, while many of his peers were just settling into high school. He skipped both the ninth and 12th grades, eventually enrolling in the same college his father and grandfather attended. He studied sociology at Morehouse before going on to earn his doctorate at Boston College.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, at his maternal grandparents’ home in Atlanta, Georgia, just one block east of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. The site is currently maintained by the National Park Service, which has worked tirelessly to preserve the two-story house, located at 501 Auburn Avenue NE.

Through his leadership during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. became one of the most widely recognized leaders of the civil rights movement. It was the first mass protest for civil rights in the U.S. and reinforced King’s nonviolent approach. The boycott lasted 381 days (from January 1955 to January 1956), and laid the foundation for many influential civil rights protests to come.

Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on April 12, 1963, after protesting to bring awareness to racist treatment in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. While in solitary confinement, King drafted an impassioned defense of his actions, criticizing fellow religious leaders who sat idly by while attacking his nonviolent methods. The 7,000-word “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was later published across the country.

In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. became the youngest (as of then) recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The award recognized his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through nonviolent means such as peaceful protest and civil disobedience.

Coretta Scott King was a devoted advocate for civil rights alongside her husband. The pair met in Boston while they were both studying at university, and they married on June 18, 1953. After King’s death, Coretta continued his work, and in 1983 she brought together more than 800 human rights organizations to form the Coalition of Conscience, a network of historic sites and memorials around the world dedicated to protecting human rights.

Growing up, Martin Luther King Jr. didn't plan to become a minister like his father. But while King was studying sociology at Morehouse College in Atlanta, the college’s president, Benjamin E. Mays, encouraged him to pursue a religious path. King was ordained before he even graduated, and went on to study theology at Boston University, where he earned his doctorate in 1955.

Although the holiday doesn’t always fall on Martin Luther King Jr.’s actual birthday (January 15), the U.S. commemorates King’s life and legacy each year on the third Monday of January. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill to designate the day an official federal holiday in 1983.

The first time Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was in 1957, when he spoke to around 30,000 people, imploring, “Give us the ballot.” When he returned to the Lincoln Memorial six years later for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he spoke to around 250,000 people as part of the historic March on Washington to advocate for civil rights.