Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. goes down in history as one of the principal leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest.  King's challenges to segregation and racial discrimination helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.  He graduated from Morehouse College in 1948 and from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951.  Which is  now the  Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York.  In 1955 he earned a  doctoral degree in Systematic Theology from Boston University.  While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, whom he married in 1953.

In 1954, King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery's black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. Heading the year-long bus-boycott against segregation in buses, King soon became a national figure. In 1957,  King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. King and other SCLC leaders encouraged the use of nonviolent marches, demonstrations, and boycotts to protest discrimination as well as other nonviolent measures.

King and other Black Leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in United States history, Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. The speech and the march created the political momentum that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in education and employment. As a result of King's effective leadership, he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.