The Education and Academic Achievements of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr., a pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement, was not only a powerful orator and activist but also a dedicated scholar. His pursuit of knowledge and academic excellence played a significant role in shaping his leadership and his ability to articulate the moral imperative for equality and justice. From his early education in segregated schools to his doctoral studies in theology, King's academic journey provided him with the intellectual tools and philosophical framework to challenge racial injustice and inspire a nation.
Early Life and Education
Michael King Jr., who later became known as Martin Luther King Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second of three children born to Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King's family had deep roots in the African-American Baptist church. His maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, was a minister in rural Georgia who later became the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. King's father, Michael King Sr., followed in his father-in-law's footsteps and became the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church after Williams' death in 1931.
King's early life was shaped by his family's strong religious beliefs and their commitment to social justice. He witnessed his father stand up against segregation and discrimination on numerous occasions. One such instance occurred when a police officer referred to Martin Sr. as "boy," to which he retorted that Martin Jr. was a boy, but he was a man. Another time, when King Jr.'s father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back. Martin Sr. refused, asserting "We'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all", before leaving the store with Martin Jr.
King began his education at the Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. He later attended David T. Howard Elementary School, the Atlanta University Laboratory School, and Booker T. Washington High School. Due to his high score on college entrance examinations in his junior year of high school, he advanced to Morehouse College without formally graduating from Booker T. Washington, skipping both the ninth and twelfth grades.
As an adolescent, King felt resentment against whites due to the "racial humiliation" that he, his family, and his neighbors often had to endure. However, he was also brought up in a Baptist home, and as he entered adolescence, he began to question the literalist teachings preached at his father's church. At the age of 13, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus during Sunday school.
Read also: What makes a quality PE curriculum?
Morehouse College
In 1944, at the young age of 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically Black university from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. At Morehouse, King initially favored studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged.
Morehouse College was fertile ground for the young Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the president of Morehouse, was a significant influence on King's spiritual development, encouraging him to view Christianity as a potential force for progressive social change. Mays' rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King’s father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King.
Outstanding professors also shaped Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse. As a sociology major, King was introduced to the problem of segregation by department chair Dr. Walter P. Chivers. Dr. George D. Kelsey, his favorite professor, set an example of what an ideal minister could be, someone who could combine the tradition of religion with the modern world’s issues. President Mays introduced him to the Indian social reformer Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings and his method of nonviolent protest.
In high school, King became known for his public-speaking ability, with a voice that had grown into an orotund baritone. He joined the school's debate team and maintained an abundant vocabulary. King continued to be most drawn to history and English and chose English and sociology as his main subjects.
As King finished his final year at Morehouse, it was evident that he had transformed into the leader he was destined to become when he wrote in the student publication, The Maroon Tiger: "We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education." In 1948, King graduated from Morehouse College with a B.A. degree in Sociology.
Read also: Maximize Savings on McGraw Hill Education
Crozer Theological Seminary
After graduating from Morehouse, King enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951.
At Crozer, King was elected president of the student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. He also won the Pearl Plafker Award for the most outstanding student and received the J. Lewis Crozer fellowship for graduate study at a university of his choice.
Mentored by local minister and King family friend J. Pius Barbour, he reacted skeptically to a presentation on pacifism by Fellowship of Reconciliation leader A. J. Muste. Moreover, by the end of his seminary studies King had become increasingly dissatisfied with the abstract conceptions of God held by some modern theologians and identified himself instead with the theologians who affirmed personalism, or a belief in the personality of God.
For a time, he was interested in Walter Rauschenbusch's "social gospel". King reproved another student for keeping beer in his room once, saying they shared responsibility as African Americans to bear "the burdens of the Negro race".
Boston University and Doctoral Studies
With a fellowship won at Crozer, King enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In September of 1951, Martin Luther King began doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at Boston University. He also studied at Harvard University.
Read also: Becoming a Neonatal Nurse
The papers (including his dissertation) that King wrote during his years at Boston University displayed little originality, and some contained extensive plagiarism; but his readings enabled him to formulate an eclectic yet coherent theological perspective. By the time he completed his doctoral studies in 1955, King had refined his exceptional ability to draw upon a wide range of theological and philosophical texts to express his views with force and precision.
His dissertation, A Comparison of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wieman, was completed in 1955, and the Ph.D. degree was conferred. An academic inquiry in October 1991 concluded that portions of his doctoral dissertation were plagiarisms and he had acted improperly. However, "[d]espite its finding, the committee said that 'no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr.
While studying, King served as an assistant minister at Boston's historic Twelfth Baptist Church, which was renowned for its abolitionist origins. Hester was an old friend of King's father and was an important influence on King. He also befriended a small cadre of local ministers his age, and sometimes guest pastored at their churches, including Michael E. Haynes, associate pastor at Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury.
Marriage and Family
During his stay in Boston, King also met and courted Coretta Scott, an Alabama-born Antioch College graduate who was then a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. On 18 June 1953, the two students were married in Marion, Alabama, where Scott’s family lived. The Reverend King, Sr., performed the service.
They had four children: Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.
Ministry and the Civil Rights Movement
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Upon completion of his studies at Boston University, he accepted the call of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama. He was the pastor of Dexter Avenue from September 1954 to November 1959, when he resigned to move to Atlanta to direct the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals.
In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi.
In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B.
At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Legacy
Dr. King's concept of somebodiness gave black and poor people a new sense of worth and dignity. His philosophy of nonviolent direct action, and his strategies for rational and non-destructive social change, galvanized the conscience of this nation and reordered its priorities. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, went to Congress as a result of the Selma to Montgomery march. His wisdom, his words, his actions, his commitment, and his dreams for a new cast of life, are intertwined with the American experience. Dr. King's speech at the march on Washington in 1963, his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, his last sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and his final speech in Memphis (I've Been to the Mountaintop)are among his most famous.
Dr. King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, by James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray was arrested in London, England on June 8, 1968, and returned to Memphis, Tennessee to stand trial for the assassination of Dr. King. On March 9, 1969, before coming to trial, he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. Dr. King had been in Memphis to help lead sanitation workers in a protest against low wages and intolerable conditions. His funeral services were held on April 9, 1968, in Atlanta at Ebenezer Church and on the campus of Morehouse College, with the President of the United States proclaiming a day of mourning and flags being flown at half-staff. The area where Dr. King was entombed is located on Freedom Plaza and surrounded by the Freedom Hall Complex of the Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a holiday in cities and states throughout the United States beginning in 1971; the federal holiday was first observed in 1986.
tags: #Martin #Luther #King #Jr #education #and
