Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers. He studied at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, where he earned a doctorate in systematic theology in 1955. That same year he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and was drawn almost immediately into the struggle that would define his life.
King came of age in a nation where racial segregation was written into law and enforced by violence. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56 established him as a national figure, and over the following decade he led campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, helped organize the March on Washington in 1963, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Throughout this work he drew on the tradition of Gandhian nonviolence, but his deeper framework was theological: he understood the movement as a redemptive effort rooted in the demands of the Christian gospel itself.
King's preaching and writing returned persistently to the claim that justice was not merely a political goal but a spiritual obligation. His "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963) offered a sustained theological argument for direct action, drawing on natural law, Augustine, and Aquinas alongside the prophets. His sermons wove together Scripture, history, and immediate social reality with uncommon force, insisting that a faith indifferent to the suffering of neighbors was no faith at all. He was candid about his own fears and failures, and in his later years he extended his critique to poverty and militarism at considerable cost to his public support.
King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. His legacy endures not only as a monument of American history but as a persistent challenge to every congregation that would separate worship from the obligations of the world outside its doors.