Martin Luther King Jr

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929 (Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King Jr., laureate record). He became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and from 1960 served with his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King Jr., biographical note).

In April 1963 he was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama after leading the Good Friday march (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Brennan, dissenting, paragraph 77). From the jail he wrote the letter in which he explains why he had come to the city (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 1) and speaks, as a minister who loves the church, of his disappointment with the white churches of the South (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 7); see the Churches and the Civil Rights Movement. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964, awarded for his non-violent struggle for civil rights (Nobel Prize, Martin Luther King Jr., laureate record). He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968 (Johnson, Statement on the Assassination of Dr. King (4 April 1968), statement and note).