Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in 1929 and died in 1968. He was an American clergyman known for his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
He led the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He organized nonviolent marches to protest segregation and racial injustice. This peaceful means of protest is known as passive resistance. His 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech dealing with peace and racial equality is one of the most powerful speeches in American history. Dr. King was assassinated by a gunman in 1968.

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 John F. Kennedy; 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 (avancement) of the civil rights