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=**__ Martin Luther King __**=

Martin Luther King was born January 15 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from morehouse college in 1948 with a bachelor of arts degree. 6 years later at age 25 he became a pastor of baptist church. In 1957 he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), A group organizing black churches to conduct non violent protests. At 33, he was pressing the case of civil rights with the president John Kennedy. At 34, he gave his "I have a dream" speech to the nation. At 35, he won the nobel peace prize for his work to end racial segregation and at 39 was assassinated, leaving a legacy of hope and inspiration that still continues today.

//**Was he inspired by other protestors?**//
One of his inspirations was a civil rights leader called Howard Thurman who was an early influence on him. He mentored King and his friends when they were young. Howard was a classmate of King's father at Morehouse college. Some other influences on him where Jesus, Mahatma Ghandhi and Bayard Rustin.

//**What did he protest about?**//
One of his first major protests was the montgomery bus boycott in 1955, this happened after a 15 year old girl refused to give up her seat to a white man which she was later arrested for. The boycott lasted for 385 days and things became so tense that martin's house got bombed. In 1963, Kings non voilent tactics were put to the test in birmingham, during a mass protest for fair hiring pratices and the desegregation of department store facilities. King was arrested and wrote "letter from a birmingham jail" to refute critics. Later that year, king was a speaker at the historic March on Washington, where he gave one of the most passionate addresses of his career. A few months later Time magazine named him person of the year. King next brought his crusade to Chicago, where he launched programs to rehabilitate the slums and provide housing but after king discovered that black people from the north cared little for his preaching. This is one of the reasons he rallied behind a new cause, the vietnam war. People saw this as a tactical mistake but many people rushed into the movement. King then Turned his attention to domestic issues that he though were stemed fromt he war. He called for a gruaranteed family income, He threatened national boycotts and spoke of disrupting whole citys by "camp ins." He planned a massive march of the poor on washington D.C but never got to because he was assassinated on the 4th of april while staying at the Lorraine Hotel.

//**How has his protests affected today?**//
He is still regarded mainly as the black leader of the movement for black equality but for all that he did to free the black people from segregation, white people may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from America's centuries old hypocrisy about race. Had king and the blacks and whites that followed him failed, many regions of the U.S. would still be in an apartheid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/mlk/king/biography.html http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/king.html