Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief description of King's life and his achievements will provide useful background, for specific incidents and experiences in his life are reflected in the speech, as shall be noted.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. He entered Morehouse College at the age of 15 and was ordained a Baptist minister at the age of 17. Graduating from Crozer Theological Seminary as class president in 1951, he then did postgraduate work at Boston University.

King's studies at Crozer and Boston led him to explore the works of the Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose ideas became the core of his o

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much for it. He wasn't simply performing the work he did to help his fellow blacks; he was doing God's work (Washington, 1992, p. 36). On a visit to India in 1959 King was able to work out more clearly his understanding of Satyagraha, Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a strategic move that enabled him to participate more effectively in the national leadership of the burgeoning civil rights movement (Pauley, 1998, p. 323). In the wake of his visit to India, King became ever more convinced that the purpose of his work was to bring social justice and freedom to all peoples because it was through the achievement of allowing each individual freedom to live his or her life in accordance with moral principles and private dreams that each of those individuals and the country as a whole would be both free and at peace. His exhortation that we should all be ôfree at lastö is based on the Indian philosophies that he studied both in the United States and in India in many ways. He does not call for victory or triumph in his ô
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