In , he was admitted to Morehouse College, where both his father and maternal grandfather attended, and he studied medicine and law. After graduating in , he attended the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania , for three years. He was elected president of a predominantly white senior class and was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity degree in With a fellowship he won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University and received his doctorate in The couple married on June 18, , and would eventually have two sons and two daughters.
By that time, he was a member of the executive committee and an active participant of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP , the leading organization of its kind in the nation. The protest began after Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested on December 1, In the highly segregated city, activists coordinated a bus boycott that continued for days.
The protest placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners, and Montgomery found itself at the center of the struggle for civil rights in America. Finally, in November , the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional. Acting as the spokesperson for the boycott, King entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.
Unfortunately, he also became a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his home in January. In , Dr. He then moved his family back to his home town of Atlanta, Georgia, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. However, he also continued to organize nonviolent protests against unequal treatment of African-American people.
King survived to use the attempted assassination to reinforce his dedication to nonviolence:. As the spokesman of the SCLC, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over 1, times in the next decade. Kennedy who shared his opinion on equal rights. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, took part. The march was a big success. After Kennedy was killed in November , the next American government passed a law that gave blacks the same rights as white people. It is called the Civil Rights Act.
The new law gave blacks the same opportunities in education and work. It also gave them the right to vote. In his later life, Martin Luther King found out that not all blacks wanted to fight for equal rights the way he did. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. He brought blacks and whites together.
He made a speech in front of the world and he persuaded people to treat blacks and whites the same. People threw bricks at him, put him in jail, but he kept on going. He graduated in and then he met Coretta Scott and they were married a year later. Then he started work in Montgomery. After that he visited the White House. In he got arrested for a protest and was in jail for two weeks. Then in , he spoke at the March on Washington. He was arrested again for eating at an whites only restaurant.
Although King lived a short life, he did a lot of good. He was determined, hardworking, tolerant, and compassionate throughout his life. He showed perseverance through thick and thin. I could fill up a whole page on the traits he had that make him an astonishing hero. He united white and African American people, and he stayed in jail to show how determined he was to make his race matter.
In , Martin became a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Martin worked intensely for civil rights. A few years later, Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white person on the bus.
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