Martin Luther King: "I Have A Dream"

. . . . . . . . . .

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have
a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true
meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are
created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves
and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table
of brotherhood.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will
not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith,
we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail
together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
. . . . . . . . . .

Biography: Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968)

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was born Michael
Luther King, Jr.,but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather
began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the
present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor.
Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating
from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948
from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from
which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of
theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he
was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded
the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate
studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in
1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta
Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two
sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights
for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive
committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in
December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent
demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott
described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate.
The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court
of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation
on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of
boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to
personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil
rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its
operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957
and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred
times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile
he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.

In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the
attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and
inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution;
he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he
directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he
delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President J. F. Kennedy
and he campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of
twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees;
was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the
symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have
received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced
that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil
rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room
in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with
striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

© Herbert Paukert