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Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability

By Kelefa Sanneh

Not long ago, a Tennessee state representative named Justin J. Pearson delivered a familiar-sounding speech at a meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Pearson had recently taken part in a gun-control protest on the floor of the state’s House, in violation of legislative rules. He and a fellow-representative were expelled, but the commissioners in Shelby voted to reinstate him. Pearson is only twenty-eight, but his Afro evokes the Black Power era of the late nineteen-sixties, and the preacherly cadence he sometimes uses reaches back even further than that. “We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate, until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” he said at the meeting, thrusting his index finger for emphasis. He was quoting the Old Testament (Amos 5:24: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), but really he was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who put a version of that phrase at the center of his speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

When King was assassinated, in 1968, he was generally viewed as a leader with a mixed record. President Lyndon B. Johnson had grown frustrated with him, and he was beset by detractors who found him either too much or not enough of a troublemaker; the year before, an article in The New York Review of Books had referred to his “irrelevancy.” But in the years after his death the skeptics grew quieter and scarcer. In 1983, Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, over the objection of twenty-two senators. And now, as national heroes of all sorts are being reassessed, the question is usually not whether King was great but, rather, which King was the greatest. The 2014 film “ Selma ” reverently dramatized his voting-rights activism; some people these days focus on his anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War; others emphasize his advocacy of integration, and his vision of a time when Black children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The proof, and the price, of King’s success is that everyone wants a piece of him.

The first biography of King was published in 1959, a few years after the Montgomery bus boycott, his first big victory. It was written by Lawrence D. Reddick, who was not a neutral observer—he had helped King write his first book, “ Stride Toward Freedom .” The historian David Levering Lewis published a thoughtful King biography in 1970, which captured the pessimistic mood that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Lewis portrayed King as a gifted preacher who “moralized the plight of the American black in simplistic and Manichaean terms” but “failed” in his broader effort to promote “economic and political reform.” Between 1988 and 2006, Taylor Branch published the three-volume history “ America in the King Years ,” which ran to nearly three thousand pages; in 1989, Branch was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Rather than preëmpting future books about King, the trilogy seemed to inspire more of them. The latest is “ King: A Life ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Jonathan Eig, whose previous book was a biography of Muhammad Ali. Eig wants to give readers an alternative to the “defanged” version of King that endures in inspirational quotes. Eig’s new sources include the latest batch of files released by the F.B.I., which was surveilling King even more closely than he suspected; notes from Reddick; and remembrances from King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who recorded her thoughts in the time after his killing. “The portrait that emerges here may trouble some people,” Eig writes—the book recounts a number of King’s affairs, as well as the allegation, from an F.B.I. report, that King was complicit in a sexual assault.

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What Eig mostly provides, though, is a sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life, and one that can’t help but be admiring, given how much King accomplished, and how quickly he did so—he was thirty-nine when he was killed. Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen, and, above all, segregationists wielding legal and political authority. He also captures King’s sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it. King viewed nonviolent protest as both a moral imperative and a political winner, because it made protesters look good and segregationists look bad. This sense of how things would play on newspaper front pages and television screens, this exacting attention to appearances, marked King as a distinctly contemporary activist—a master of the viral moment. It also marked him as an unapologetic practitioner of what’s now known as “respectability politics”: the idea that a group is more likely to be treated with respect if its members behave respectably. Unlike King himself, respectability politics does not have a great reputation; the term is used primarily by critics of it who worry that this approach tends to “rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence,” in the words of one NPR report . This is the most paradoxical aspect of King’s long, glorious afterlife: fifty-five years after his death, he is almost universally respected, but his lifelong devotion to the politics of respectability is not.

“Nepotism” would be an unduly censorious word for the family dynamic that shaped King’s life, though not an inaccurate one. When he was born, in 1929, his maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, an Atlanta institution. Two years later, his father took over, thereby becoming one of the most prominent Black leaders in the city. (At the time, King and his father were both named Michael; the father renamed them both a few years later, in honor of the German theologian.) King was born rich and famous, at least by the standards that prevailed in Atlanta’s Black community. Eig writes that he and his siblings “were watched wherever they went and expected to behave.” Accordingly, King was intent on living up to expectations. When he was eighteen, during the second of two summers that he spent in Connecticut picking tobacco, he and some friends were pulled over by the police during a night out. When he called home to tell his parents, he also told them, perhaps strategically, that he had decided to become a preacher, like his father.

He was clearly gifted, with a resonant voice and a knack for rhythm and repetition—Eig compares him to “a talented jazz musician,” in part because he could make other people’s riffs sound like his own. King collected an armful of college degrees, including a theology Ph.D. from Boston University which became a source of controversy in 1989, when researchers discovered that his dissertation was partially plagiarized. He could have accepted a position with his father at Ebenezer, but he chose instead to move to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was in search of a new leader.

King played no role in Rosa Parks’s decision, in 1955, to refuse to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus, but shortly after she was arrested he joined local Black pastors who were organizing a bus boycott. He delivered his first real protest speech at a church meeting on December 5, 1955, employing those twin similes he later made famous. “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he said. He was putting prophetic language in service of a proposal that was actually a compromise: a system of self-segregation, in which white and Black riders would have an equal chance to seat themselves, filling up the bus front to back and back to front, respectively. It was only after the companies refused that King and his allies shifted to a demand—full integration—as bold and clear as his rhetoric.

The Montgomery boycott was impressive partly because of the efficiency with which King and other leaders mobilized to help boycotters get to and from work, and partly because of the astonishing abuse that they withstood, including a bombing at King’s house. But the boycott may have been less consequential than the work of a team of lawyers, associated with the N.A.A.C.P., who sued the city on behalf of four Black bus riders who had been subject to segregation. The boycott put pressure on the city government, but it’s unclear whether it influenced the two district-court judges who struck down the Montgomery ordinance requiring bus segregation, or the Supreme Court Justices who summarily affirmed that decision, ending the era of bus segregation. On December 20, 1956, King announced the Supreme Court’s ruling by paraphrasing an old abolitionist preacher: he reassured his listeners, not for the last time, that “the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.” The next morning, he became one of the first people to ride an integrated bus in Montgomery.

The triumph in Alabama transformed King from a local leader into a national figure, and in certain quarters a superhero—some of his allies turned the saga into a comic book, “ Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story ,” illustrated by Sy Barry, who went on to draw “The Phantom.” Eig, in his biography, shows how King viewed Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolence as an extension of the Christian ethic of sacrificial love. But there remains something mysterious and mesmerizing about King’s calm certainty, which reproduced itself in the minds of his followers. In one of his most popular sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” King delivered a startling warning to anyone opposed to the liberation of Black people in America: “Be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.” Any ordinary leader can promise his followers deliverance; it takes an extraordinary one to promise them tribulation.

During a disappointing anti-segregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, King encountered a wily chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who understood his strategy; after King was arrested, Pritchett arranged to have someone pay his bail, so that he would be involuntarily released. “These fellows respond better when I am in jail,” King said, years later, referring to the politicians he was trying to pressure. In Birmingham, he had a better—that is, worse—adversary: Bull Connor, the city’s public-safety commissioner, who kept King imprisoned long enough to compose “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his most celebrated essay, and whose brutal tactics were captured in a widely circulated photograph of a police dog lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy. King and his allies recruited children to their protests, on the theory that they could go to jail without missing work. In “Eyes on the Prize,” the indispensable public-television documentary from 1987, one of King’s allies, the Reverend James Bevel, recalled borrowing a police bullhorn to calm rowdy demonstrators, because he wanted to avert a riot. “If you’re not going to respect policemen, you’re not going to be in the movement,” he told them.

For King, the civil-rights movement consisted of almost nothing but difficult choices. (The strategy of keeping adults out of jail by sending kids in their stead was controversial then, and would probably be even more controversial now.) What’s amazing is how, in the course of a decade, he got so many of them right, relying more on instinct than on any formal decision-making process within his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he pressed ahead with the March on Washington, even though President John F. Kennedy told him that it was “a great mistake,” and the result was the most celebrated demonstration in American history. He was at the White House when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but still risked upsetting Johnson by protesting the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Selma, Alabama; the protests spurred the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. At one point, King wrote to a friend, half complaining, “People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat for the rest of my life.”

Thirty years ago, a scholar named Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham published “ Righteous Discontent ,” a great book about a different group of Black Baptist leaders. Higginbotham told the story of the Church’s Women’s Convention, which was founded in 1900 and became one of the most effective Black advocacy organizations in the country. Higginbotham noticed that the group’s appeals combined “conservative” and “radical” rhetoric, and her book popularized a term for this approach: “the politics of respectability.” It was a wide-ranging strategy, encompassing everything from legal work to children’s toys—the Convention sold Black dolls, meant to “represent the intelligent and refined Negro of today,” as opposed to the “disgraceful and humiliating type that we have been accustomed to seeing black dolls made of.” The women who led this movement valued good behavior for its own sake. (One spoke about “the poison generated by jazz music and improper dancing.”) But they also viewed it as a tool to use in their struggle for equality. Higginbotham quoted the minutes from a 1910 meeting, in which the leaders acknowledged that “a certain class of whites” was refusing to make space for Black passengers to sit down on streetcars, and urged Black passengers not to try and squeeze in. The advice took the form of a moral commandment: “Let us at all times and on all occasions, remember that the quiet, dignified individual who is respectful to others is after all the superior individual, be he black or white.”

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Often, Higginbotham noted, respectability politics meant encouraging “middle-class ideals and aspirations” among the broader Black public. If propriety was part of the solution to Black oppression, then perhaps impropriety was part of the problem. “Respectability’s emphasis on individual behavior served inevitably to blame blacks for their victimization and, worse yet, to place an inordinate amount of blame on black women,” Higginbotham wrote. (A Women’s Convention report from 1913 declared that Black women who failed to run orderly households were “an enemy to the race.”) But Higginbotham concluded that these tactics were effective, and probably indispensable. “The politics of respectability afforded black church women a powerful weapon of resistance to race and gender subordination,” she wrote. The notion of respectability may have been entangled with these oppressions, too—but, then, so was everything else.

This is the Black Baptist world that King was born into: his mother, Alberta Williams King, was the organ player at Ebenezer and served for more than a decade as the president of the church’s Women’s Committee. (In 1974, she was playing the organ when a deranged worshipper shot and killed her.) Like the Black Baptist women who helped pave his way, King stressed the importance of “dignified” behavior; he knew that claims of Black incivility or criminality were often used to justify segregation. During the Montgomery boycott, organizers trained activists to be polite, to avoid confrontation, and not to respond in kind when they were cursed at, as they almost always were. And when King announced the boycott’s end he urged his supporters to respond with “calm dignity and wise restraint,” stressing that “if we become victimized with violent intents, we will have walked in vain.” King was a towering political figure, but he was also a pastor, necessarily concerned with personal virtue as well as social change. In 1957, addressing a crowd of demonstrators in Washington, he delivered a rousing speech centered on a firm demand: “Give us the ballot.” But, even then, he added a note of rebuke, warning of the danger of resentment. “If we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns,” he said, “the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.” This was political advice, calculated to keep the support of white moderates, but it was also spiritual advice: a way of urging the activists in the crowd to be guided by the force of agape, or Christian love, and to conduct themselves accordingly.

King knew that the appearance of propriety was especially important for someone in his position. According to some of his friends, including Harry Belafonte, the love of King’s life was Betty Moitz, a white woman whom he dated while at seminary, in Pennsylvania; King’s father was one of many people who told him that an interracial marriage would fatally compromise his ability to be a leader, and the couple split before he graduated. He met Coretta in Boston, where she was a conservatory student. He was, of course, a great talker, and she did not recoil when he asked her if she thought that she could be a “good preacher’s wife.” This was an important church role, although not a coequal one, and Coretta later remembered that King once explained the difference in stark terms. “You see, I am called,” he told her, “and you aren’t.” One of King’s associates, Hosea Williams, reported that King could be cruel to Coretta—he recalled hearing him tell her to “shut up” on numerous occasions. And King’s constant travel would have been difficult for her even if he had been faithful.

Some of King’s associates knew about his affairs, and so did the F.B.I. During one of King’s trips to New York, the Bureau recorded him speaking to women in four different cities. Among the women in King’s life was Georgia Davis Powers, who later became the first woman and the first Black person elected to the Kentucky Senate, and who published a memoir in 1995 that detailed her relationship with King. She thought that they were merely friends and allies until the day King’s brother, A.D., told her, “Martin has been thinking about you since you last met.” Eig’s book makes clear just how closely the F.B.I. was watching King, apparently in the hope of collecting enough damaging information to prosecute him, intimidate him, or drive him to suicide. (William C. Sullivan, the head of domestic intelligence, sent King audio recordings of him with women, along with a note that said, “There is but one way out for you.”) The Bureau’s vendetta against King inevitably affects the way we view its report that, one night in early 1964, a pastor friend of King’s “forcibly raped” a woman during a hotel gathering; a handwritten addendum specifies that “King looked on, laughed, and offered advice.” The report is based on audio recordings that are due to be made public in 2027, and which may help us better understand how wide the gap between the public and the private King really was.

The criticism of respectability politics goes beyond the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. Ideas about who was and who wasn’t respectable helped shape the leadership of King’s movement, and sometimes constrained it. The activist and organizer Ella Baker served as the interim executive director of the S.C.L.C. in the late fifties, but said that she was never allowed to function as a true leader there, because “masculine and ministerial ego” prevented it. Bayard Rustin, one of the architects of the civil-rights movement, was widely known to be gay, and in 1960, after Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., threatened to spread a false rumor that King and Rustin were lovers, King accepted Rustin’s resignation from the S.C.L.C. This, perhaps, was respectability politics at its most coldly political and its least preacherlike. (King did not appear to have strong convictions about homosexuality.) King wanted to make sure that his movement commanded broad respect, so he had to pay close attention to what was considered respectable.

In the years after Higginbotham’s book came out, the phrase “respectability politics” entered common usage, often as a way to describe Black luminaries and leaders who urged other Black people to behave better—to be worthy heirs of King’s legacy. In “ The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics ” (2012), for example, the political scientist Fredrick C. Harris chastised Hampton University, a historically Black institution, for prohibiting its business-school students from wearing “braids, dreadlocks, and other unusual hairstyles”—a way of “policing the personal behavior of ‘wayward’ blacks.” Harris and others also criticized Bill Cosby, who in a 2004 speech pronounced that “the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” and President Obama , who declared, during his 2008 campaign, that in Black communities “too many fathers” had “abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” Harris thought that this kind of focus on personal responsibility made it sound as if Black people no longer faced “social barriers,” and so made it harder to dismantle those barriers.

Most politicians find it useful to deliver occasional admonitions amid all the promises. These leaders probably overestimate the effect of their moral exhortations. But critics of respectability politics probably do, too. Was Obama’s Presidency really hobbled by his promotion of family values, or by his infrequent remarks about the problems he saw in a community that he regarded as his own? The Black legal scholar Randall Kennedy has written perceptively in defense of what he calls “progressive black respectability politics,” insisting that Black people ought to have high hopes and high standards, for both themselves and their country. In the Black Lives Matter era, respectability politics has returned in a more upbeat and perhaps more patronizing form, with proliferating celebrations of “Black girl magic” and “Black excellence.” (The idea, it sometimes seems, is to do what parents are nowadays taught to do: praise the good behavior and ignore the bad.) And platforms like Twitter have made it easy to call out people who fail to hold respectable opinions or to use respectable language. Eschewing respectability politics altogether would mean ceasing to have strong views about how other people should behave, which would require even more self-control than King asked of his followers.

Respectability is an enduring concept, but a shifting one: you can disapprove of King’s infidelity and also lament the way Rustin was treated, just as you can find a ban on dreadlocks to be ill-judged without opposing dress codes altogether. In the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, King found that his lifelong devotion to respectability may have cost him the respect of a new generation of leaders and followers. In 1967, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton published “ Black Power: The Politics of Liberation ,” which argued that the civil-rights movement was over, and deservedly so. “The traditional approaches failed,” they wrote, adding that “black people must make demands without regard to their initial ‘respectability,’ precisely because ‘respectable’ demands have not been sufficient.” This had become the conventional wisdom; the year before, the Times had announced, on its front page, that “the civil rights movement is falling into increasing disarray.” Major riots in Los Angeles, in 1965, and in Detroit and Newark, in 1967, were doubly damaging to King, linking his movement to violence while also illustrating the limits of his control over it. For his part, King widened his campaign, publicly opposing the Vietnam War, which he had previously declined to criticize, and taking aim less at specific laws than at poverty and inequality more broadly. “Racism is genocide,” King said at a press conference in Chicago, where he discovered that it was much easier to galvanize resistance to a cruel police chief than to a faceless landlord accused of neglecting his property. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, in particular, alienated President Johnson, and many of the moderates who had supported King’s earlier campaigns. “I figure I was politically unwise but morally wise,” King said, and the fact that he felt he had to choose between these two different kinds of wisdom was itself proof that his options were narrowing.

In Eig’s book, King’s death feels foreordained, and perhaps it felt that way to him, too. He had been not just threatened and bombed but also punched in the face (by a white man affiliated with the American Nazi Party) and stabbed in the chest (by a Black woman who was, in King’s word, “demented”); as a teen-ager, he had attempted suicide, and as an adult he was hospitalized a number of times for what was usually described as “exhaustion,” though many who knew him said that he struggled with depression. Despite these portents, it’s still disquieting to read his death-haunted final speech, delivered in Memphis, where he was supporting striking sanitation workers. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.” The next night, on his motel balcony, King was shot by James Earl Ray, a convicted felon and a committed segregationist. King was pronounced dead at a local hospital, about an hour later.

To many Black Power advocates, King’s Christian faith in the curvature of the moral universe seemed naïve. What proof is there that stoic suffering and good behavior will bring justice closer? King’s speeches often relied on anaphora, which could have hypnotic power. “How long? Not long,” he said, over and over again, addressing a crowd in Selma, in 1965. “How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” This was a rousing message of determination, and maybe also an acknowledgment that even an extraordinary leader can’t ask his followers to suffer with dignity indefinitely. King’s version of nonviolence really was radical: he persuaded people not only to forswear rioting or bad behavior but to forswear self-defense—and willingly allow themselves to be jailed, beaten, maybe even killed. This political strategy probably had an expiration date; King’s early success created a sense of accelerating progress that was impossible to sustain.

Yet even now many political leaders find themselves inspired by King’s language, and by his ability to frame political conflicts in a way that made it obvious which side was deserving of respect and which was not. The idea of King as a failure has not aged well: it is hard to argue that the civil-rights leaders who came after him were more effective. In the years since his assassination, we have found different ways to define “respectable,” and different forms of respectability politics. But it’s still not clear that we have learned to live without it. ♦

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By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The New Definitive Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

“King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig, is the first comprehensive account of the civil rights icon in decades.

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• Published May 8, 2023 Updated May 28, 2023

KING: A Life , by Jonathan Eig

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Growing up, he was called Little Mike, after his father, the Baptist minister Michael King. Later he sometimes went by M.L. Only in college did he drop his first name and began to introduce himself as Martin Luther King Jr. This was after his father visited Germany and, inspired by accounts of the reform-minded 16th-century friar Martin Luther, adopted his name.

King Jr. was born in 1929. Were he alive he would be 94, the same age as Noam Chomsky. The prosperous King family lived on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. One writer, quoted by Jonathan Eig in his supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable new biography, “King: A Life,” called it “the richest Negro street in the world.”

Eig’s is the first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography “Bearing the Cross” as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently in The Spectator . It also updates the material in Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy about America during the King years.

King and his two siblings had the trappings of middle-class life in Atlanta: bicycles, a dog, allowances. But they were sickly aware of the racism that made white people shun them, that kept them out of most of the city’s parks and swimming pools, among other degradations.

Their father expected a lot from his children. He had a temper. He was a stern disciplinarian who spanked with a belt. Their mother was a calmer, sweeter, more stable presence. King would inherit qualities from both.

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• Martin Luther King Jr. - Biography

Martin Luther King Jr.

Biographical.

M artin 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 became pastor 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 the 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 John F. Kennedy and 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.

Selected bibliography

Adams, Russell, Great Negroes Past and Present , pp. 106-107. Chicago, Afro-Am Publishing Co., 1963.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago, Johnson, 1964.

I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King in Text and Pictures . New York, Time Life Books, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Measure of a Man . Philadelphia. The Christian Education Press, 1959. Two devotional addresses.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Strength to Love . New York, Harper & Row, 1963. Sixteen sermons and one essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.”

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story . New York, Harper, 1958.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience . New York, Harper & Row, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York, Harper & Row, 1967.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait . New York, Harper & Row, 1963.

“Man of the Year”, Time , 83 (January 3, 1964) 13-16; 25-27.

“Martin Luther King, Jr.” , in Current Biography Yearbook 1965 , ed. by Charles Moritz, pp. 220-223. New York, H.W. Wilson.

Reddick, Lawrence D., Crusader without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr . New York, Harper, 1959.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel . It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures . To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Note from Nobelprize.org: This biography uses the word “Negro”. Even though this word today is considered inappropriate, the biography is published in its original version in view of keeping it as a historical document.

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Position: Pitcher

Bats: Right  •  Throws: Left

6-1 ,  184lb  (185cm, 83kg)

Team: Houston Astros (majors)

Born: November 5 , 1996 in Littleton, CO us

Draft : Drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 30th round of the 2019 MLB June Amateur Draft from McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA) .

High School: Ponderosa HS (Parker, CO)

School: McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA)

Debut: June 23, 2024 (Age 27-231d, 23,244th in major league history)

Rookie Status: Still Intact through 2024

2024 Contract Status : Not Updated

Full Name: Bryan Dalton King

Twitter: @KingofSpring09

Instagram: @kingofspring09

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• Pre-1912 SB & CS data for catchers is estimated from catcher assists, games started and opposition stolen bases.
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June 5, 2019: Drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 30th round of the 2019 amateur draft. Player signed June 19, 2019.

December 7, 2022: Selected off waivers by the Houston Astros from the Chicago Cubs .

How old is Bryan King?

Bryan King is 27 years old.

When was Bryan King born?

Bryan King was born on November 5, 1996.

Where was Bryan King born?

Bryan King was born in Littleton, CO .

How tall is Bryan King?

Bryan King is 6-1 (185 cm) tall.

How much does Bryan King weigh?

Bryan King weighs 184 lbs (83 kg).

How many seasons has Bryan King played?

Bryan King is in his 1st season.

When was Bryan King drafted?

Bryan King was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 30th round of the 2019 MLB June Amateur Draft from McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA) .

What position does Bryan King play?

Bryan King is a Pitcher.

How many strikeouts does Bryan King have?

Bryan King has 3 strikeouts this season and has 3 strikeouts over his career.

How many teams has Bryan King played for?

Bryan King has played for 1 team, the Houston Astros.

What is Bryan King's Twitter account?

Bryan King is on Twitter at KingofSpring09 .

What is Bryan King's Instagram account?

Bryan King is on Instagram at kingofspring09 .

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Martin Luther King Jr.

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 25, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington , which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act . King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day , a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia , the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College , the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music . The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church .

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church . This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial —a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The speech and march cemented King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named “Man of the Year” by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

In the spring of 1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act , which guaranteed the right to vote—first awarded by the 15th Amendment—to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated . He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray , an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” “Why We Can’t Wait,” “Strength to Love,” “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” and the posthumously published “Trumpet of Conscience” with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

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Stephen King

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Stephen King (born September 21, 1947, Portland , Maine, U.S.) is an American novelist and short-story writer whose books are credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century.

King is the second of two sons born to Donald and Nellie Ruth (née Pillsbury) King. His parents separated when he was very young. King and his elder brother, David, moved several times while growing up, living near their father’s family in Fort Wayne , Indiana , and in Stratford , Connecticut , before their mother moved them back to Maine when King was 11 years old. After graduating from high school in 1966, King attended the University of Maine , where he wrote for the school newspaper. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a teaching certificate in 1970. The following year he married the writer Tabitha Spruce, whom he met in college. While writing short stories , King earned a meager income by teaching and working in an industrial laundry, among other jobs. He had sold his first story in 1967 to a mystery fiction magazine, after which many of his stories were published in men’s magazines.

His first published novel , Carrie (1974), is about a tormented teenage girl gifted with telekinetic powers. Its inspiration was sparked by King’s memories of his brief stint working as a janitor in a high school and from an article he had read in Life magazine that proposed that girls might be susceptible to having powers of telekinesis at the time of their first menstruation . The novel’s protagonist, a misfit named Carrie White, was created as a composite of two girls whom King knew when he was growing up. After drafting three pages of the novel, King had second thoughts about his idea and threw the pages away. His wife, however, rescued the pages from the trash, read them, and encouraged him to keep going. Carrie was an immediate popular success and was adapted into a film for the first time in 1976 (directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek as Carrie). Other versions have appeared as television movies, feature films, and a musical play.

Carrie was the first of many novels in which King blended horror, the macabre , fantasy , and science fiction . Among such works are ’Salem’s Lot (1975; TV miniseries 1979 and 2004); The Shining (1977; film 1980 ; TV miniseries 1997); The Stand (1978; TV miniseries 1994 and 2020–21); and The Dead Zone (1979; film 1983 ; TV series 2002–07). The Shining , a horror novel set in a haunted Colorado hotel in the winter offseason, was inspired by King’s one-night stay in a similar hotel in Estes Park , Colorado, during a time when the Kings were living in nearby Boulder . The Stand also mostly features a Colorado setting, though many of King’s novels, including Carrie , are set in Maine.

King’s books were so popular by the 1980s that they were virtually guaranteed to be adapted into feature films, TV movies, or miniseries. That decade he published Firestarter (1980; films 1984 and 2022); Cujo (1981; film 1983 ); The Running Man (1982; film 1987); Christine (1983; film 1983); Thinner (1984; film 1996); It (1986; TV miniseries 1990; films 2017 and 2019); Misery (1987; film 1990 ); The Tommyknockers (1987; TV miniseries 1993); and The Dark Half (1989; film 1993 ).

By the early 1990s King’s books had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and his name had become synonymous with the genre of horror fiction. In the 1990s and first decades of the 21st century, he published Needful Things (1991; film 1993); Dolores Claiborne (1993; film 1995); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999); Dreamcatcher (2001; film 2003); Cell (2006; film 2016); Lisey’s Story (2006; TV miniseries 2021); Duma Key (2008); Under the Dome (2009; TV series 2013–15); 11/22/63 (2011; TV miniseries 2016); Joyland (2013); Doctor Sleep (2013; film 2019 ), a sequel to The Shining ; Revival (2014); The Outsider (2018; TV miniseries 2020); The Institute (2019); Later (2021); and Fairy Tale (2022).

King published several early novels, among them the The Running Man , under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. After admitting to being Bachman, King released a collection of the first four Bachman novels, The Bachman Books (1985), under his own name. The collection also includes his essay “Why I Was Bachman.” King later published The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007) under Bachman’s name.

King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2016) form a trilogy of hard-boiled crime novels centering on retired detective Bill Hodges. The trilogy was adapted into a TV series in 2017–19, starring Brendan Gleeson as Hodges. King also wrote a serial novel, The Dark Tower , whose first installment, The Gunslinger , appeared in 1982; an eighth volume was published in 2012. A film adaptation of the series was released in 2017, and a TV movie adaptation aired in 2020.

In his books, King explores almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires , rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts , extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare , and even a malevolent automobile . In his later fiction, exemplified by Dolores Claiborne , King has departed from the horror genre to provide sharply detailed psychological portraits of his protagonists, many of them women, who confront difficult and challenging circumstances.

Though sometimes disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King’s books show him to be a talented storyteller who deploys realistic detail, forceful plotting, and an undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. His work consistently addresses such themes as the potential for politics and technology to disrupt or even destroy an individual human life. Obsession—the forms it can assume and its power to wreck individuals, families, and whole communities—is a recurring theme in King’s fiction, driving the narratives of Christine , Misery , and Needful Things .

His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Night Shift (1978), Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993; TV miniseries 2006), Hearts in Atlantis (1999; film 2001 ), Just After Sunset (2008), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). His collection You Like It Darker is scheduled to be released in May 2024. The novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption , which was published in Different Seasons (1982), inspired the Academy Award -nominated film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins .

Numerous TV and film adaptations have been made of King’s works, and they involved such notable directors as John Carpenter , David Cronenberg , Brian De Palma , Stanley Kubrick , George A. Romero , and Rob Reiner . While King often had little participation in these projects, he wrote the TV miniseries The Stand (1994), The Shining (1997), and Lisey’s Story (2021). For The Stand and The Shining , King received Emmy Award nominations for outstanding miniseries. He also penned several motion-picture screenplays, including Maximum Overdrive (1986), which he directed.

King explored both his own career and the craft of writing in On Writing (2000), a book he completed while recovering from severe injuries he had received after being struck by a car. He has also experimented with different forms of book distribution. The Plant: Zenith Rising was released in 2000 solely as an e-book , distributed via the Internet , with readers asked but not required to pay for it. The novella UR was made available in 2009 only to users of the Kindle electronic reading device. The short story “ Drunken Fireworks” was released in 2015 as an audiobook prior to its print publication.

King and his wife, Tabitha King, have a daughter, Naomi King, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and two sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, who are novelists. With Owen King he wrote Sleeping Beauties (2017), in which women become wrapped in cocoons when they fall asleep.

King received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and the National Medal of Arts in 2015.

Stephen King

• Born September 21 , 1947 · Portland, Maine, USA
• Birth name Stephen Edwin King
• The King of Horror
• The Master of Mystery
• Height 6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
• Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958. Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders". King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf /Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away. He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning , "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history. Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home. In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian Skibinski
• Spouse Tabitha King (January 2, 1971 - present) (3 children)
• Children Naomi Rachel King Joe Hill Owen King
• Parents Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury) Donald Edwin King
• Relatives David King (Sibling)
• Usually sets stories in Maine, particularly (until "Needful Things") in the small town of Castle Rock, which he created.
• Most of his lead male characters are writers
• Almost always has a cameo in the movies or mini-series based on his novels
• Makes references to his previous novels in his books
• Horror and fantasy themes
• After watching the first cut of Rob Reiner 's Stand by Me (1986) , he was said to be crying and stated it was the closest adaptation to one of his novels he'd ever seen.
• In the 1980s he was battling a cocaine addiction. At one time his wife organized a group of family and friends and confronted him. She dumped onto the floor his trashcan, which included beer cans, cigarette butts, cough and cold medicines and various drug paraphernalia. Her message to him was: "Get help or get out. We love you, but we don't want to witness your suicide." He got help and was able to become clean and sober.
• King owns two neighboring houses in Bangor. He wanted to build an underground tunnel with a trolley you could ride between them. When asked why, he replied, "because I can".
• Will allow aspiring film-makers to purchase the film rights to any of his short stories (and only short-stories, not novels) for a dollar. The resulting films are sent directly to him and, if he enjoys them, placed on a shelf marked "Dollar-Babies.".
• King writes for 3-4 hours a day. He used to write 2000-3000 words a day, now he can only manage 1000.
• I've killed enough of the world's trees.
• I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.
• Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.
• When asked, "How do you write?", I invariably answer, "One word at a time".
• I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

Who was Martin Luther King, Jr.?

A civil rights legend, Dr. King fought for justice through peaceful protest—and delivered some of the 20th century's most iconic speeches.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is a civil rights legend. In the mid-1950s, King led the movement to end segregation and counter prejudice in the United States through the means of peaceful protest. His speeches—some of the most iconic of the 20th century—had a profound effect on the national consciousness. Through his leadership, the civil rights movement opened doors to education and employment that had long been closed to Black America.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King for his commitment to equal rights and justice for all. Observed for the first time on January 20, 1986, it’s called Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In January 2000, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all 50 U.S. states . Here’s what you need to know about King’s extraordinary life.

Though King's name is known worldwide, many may not realize that he was born Michael King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. His father , Michael King, was a pastor at the   Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. During a trip to Germany, King, Sr. was so impressed by the history of Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther that he changed not only his own name, but also five-year-old Michael’s.

( Read about Martin Luther King, Jr. with your kids .)

His brilliance was noted early, as he was accepted into Morehouse College , a historically Black school in Atlanta, at age 15. By the summer before his last year of college, King knew he was destined to continue the family profession of pastoral work and decided to enter the ministry. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Morehouse at age 19, and then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, graduating with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. He earned a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955.

King married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children : Yolanda King (1955–2007), Martin Luther King III (b. 1957), Dexter Scott King (b. 1961), and Bernice King (b. 1963).

Becoming a civil rights leader

In 1954, when he was 25 years old, Dr. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In March 1955, Claudette Colvin—a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl in Montgomery—refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, which was a violation of Jim Crow laws, local laws in the southern United States that enforced racial segregation.  

( Jim Crow laws created 'slavery by another name. ')

King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but decided that because she was so young—and had become pregnant—her case would attract too much negative attention.

Nine months later on December 1, 1955, a similar incident occurred when a seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The two incidents led to the Montgomery bus boycott , which was urged and planned by the President of the Alabama Chapter of the NAACP, E.D. Nixon, and led by King. The boycott lasted for 385 days.

King’s prominent and outspoken role in the boycott led to numerous threats against his life, and his house was firebombed. He was arrested during the campaign, which concluded with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle   ( in which Colvin was a plaintiff ) that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

Fighting for change through nonviolent protest

From the early days of the Montgomery boycott, King had often referred to India’s Mahatma Gandhi as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

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In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to harness the organizing power of Black churches to conduct nonviolent protests to ultimately achieve civil rights reform. The group was part of what was called “The Big Five” of civil rights organizations, which included the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress on Racial Equality.

Through his connections with the Big Five civil rights groups, overwhelming support from Black America and with the support of prominent individual well-wishers, King’s skill and effectiveness grew exponentially. He organized and led marches for Blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic civil rights.

( How the U.S. Voting Rights Act was won—and why it's under fire today .)

On August 28, 1963, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom became the pinnacle of King’s national and international influence. Before a crowd of 250,000 people, he delivered the legendary “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That speech, along with many others that King delivered, has had a lasting influence on world rhetoric .

In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights and social justice activism. Most of the rights King organized protests around were successfully enacted into law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act .

Economic justice and the Vietnam War

King’s opposition to the Vietnam War became a prominent part of his public persona. On April 4, 1967—exactly one year before his death—he gave a speech called “Beyond Vietnam” in New York City, in which he proposed a stop to the bombing of Vietnam. King also suggested that the United States declare a truce with the aim of achieving peace talks, and that the U.S. set a date for withdrawal.

( King's advocacy for human rights around the world still inspires today .)

Ultimately, King was driven to focus on social and economic justice in the United States. He had traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in early April 1968 to help organize a sanitation workers’ strike, and on the night of April 3, he delivered the legendary “I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech , in which he compared the strike to the long struggle for human freedom and the battle for economic justice, using the New Testament's Parable of the Good Samaritan to stress the need for people to get involved.

Assassination

But King would not live to realize that vision. The next day, April 4, 1968, King was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis by James Earl Ray , a small-time criminal who had escaped the year before from a maximum-security prison. Ray was charged and convicted of the murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison on March 10, 1969. But Ray changed his mind after three days in jail, claiming he was not guilty and had been framed. He spent the rest of his life fighting unsuccessfully for a trial, despite the ultimate support of some members of the King family and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

The turmoil that flowed from King’s assassination led many Black Americans to wonder if that dream he had spoken of so eloquently had died with him. But, today, young people around the world still learn about King's life and legacy—and his vision of equality and justice for all continue to resonate.

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Biography of King David, Biblical Jewish Leader

• Prayers and Worship
• Important Holidays
• MBA, Ohio State University Fisher College of Business
• B.A., University of Michigan

King David (c. 1000 BCE) was the Biblical ruler of ancient Israel. The son of Jesse of the tribe of Judah, David initially gained attention through the killing of Goliath. Although historians agree that David was probably a real person, there is little evidence of his life outside of the Bible.

Fast Facts: King David

• Known For: After Saul, David was the second king of the Israelite kingdom.
• Born: c. 1000 BCE in Bethlehem, Israel
• Parents: Jesse and Nitzevet (according to the Talmud; only Jesse is named in the Bible)
• Died: Unknown (according to the Bible he was 70 years old at the time of his death)
• Spouse(s): Michal, Ahinoam, Abigail, Maachah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah, Bathsheba
• Children: Amnon, Chileab, Absalom, Adonijah, Shephatiah, Ithream, Shammua, Shobab, Nathan, Solomon, Ibhar, Elishua, Nepheg, Japhia, Elishama, Eliada, Eliphalet, Tamar

According to the Bible, when David was just a young shepherd he was called to play music for King Saul in order to cure his melancholy. David later gained fame as a youth after he killed the giant Philistine Goliath with his slingshot. Saul made David his armor-bearer and son-in-law, and Saul's son Jonathan became David's loyal friend. Saul then appointed David the head of his army, a move that made David one of the most beloved leaders in the land. David's growing popularity eventually became a cause of concern for Saul, who feared that David would crave more power and desire to depose him. Saul made plans to have David killed; however, his son Jonathan warned David of his father's plans and David was able to escape to safety, hiding out for some time in the wilderness. Later, David and Saul made peace with each other.

Rise to Power

After Saul died, David rose to power by conquering Jerusalem. The northern tribes of Israel voluntarily submitted to David, and David became the second king of the united Israel (historians, however, doubt that this united kingdom actually existed). He founded a dynasty, centered in Jerusalem, that remained in power for about 500 years. David brought the Ark of the Covenant into the center of the Jewish nation, thereby infusing the Jewish national home with religion and a sense of ethics.

By creating a nation for the Jews with the Torah at its center, David brought the work of Moses to a practical conclusion and laid the foundation that would enable Judaism to survive for thousands of years to come, despite the efforts of many other nations to destroy it.

After conquering Jerusalem, David expanded his kingdom by defeating the Moabites, Edomites, Ammonites, and Philistines. As the king, David had an affair with a woman named Bathsheba , whose husband David later plotted to have killed in battle. Bathsheba gave birth to a son, Solomon.

Sometime later, another of David's sons, Absolom, launched a rebellion against him. Absolom's army met David's at the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim, which resulted in Absolom's defeat. Although David commanded his officers to spare Absolom's life, Joab—the leader of David's army—killed Absolom after the battle. David entered a period of mourning before returning to Jerusalem.

In his old age, David made arrangements for his son Solomon to succeed him as king. He died in Jerusalem at the age of 70.

Depictions in Art and Literature

One of David's most famous acts—the slaying of Goliath—is depicted in Caravaggio's "David and Goliath," a Baroque work in which the Jewish king—then a young boy—is shown towering over the body of the fallen giant. David was also immortalized in Michelangelo's eponymous statue, one of the most iconic artworks of the Renaissance. The 17-foot statue makes David seem larger than life, the ideal of strength and masculinity. Other depictions of David can be found in Joseph Heller's "God Knows," a novel written from the perspective of the Jewish king; Geraldine Brooks' "The Secret Chord;" the 1951 film "David and Bathsheba;" King Vidor's "Solomon and Sheba;" and the 2013 miniseries "The Bible." David's conflict with his son Absolom inspired William Faulkner's 1936 novel "Absolom, Absolom!"

Historical Evidence

Much of what is known about David comes from Biblical texts, many of which were written or revised years after his death. While scholars agree that there was a historical Jewish ruler named David, there is little consensus about the other details of David's life. Some scholars, for example, believe that David was merely a local chieftain and that the legends about his life were created by later generations who wished to embellish their own history. Archaeological evidence indicates that at the time of David's rule, Jerusalem was less a kingdom than a village, meaning the scope of his power was likely exaggerated. Other scholars believe that David's authority may not have been sanctioned by the larger community—there is a possibility that he maintained his power by killing his political enemies. He may have been less of a beloved leader than a ruthless prince devoted to preserving his own power.

Along with Abraham and Moses, David is one of the most famous Jewish leaders. The Bible describes him as courageous and strong in war as well as an intelligent statesman, faithful friend, and inspiring leader. He was skillful at playing musical instruments and gifted in his ability to write Psalms ( Tehilim ), or songs of praise to God. In his relationship with God, he was pious. Mistakes he did make can be attributed to his rapid rise to power and the spirit of the times in which he lived and ruled. According to Jewish tradition, the Messiah ( Mashiach ) will be one of the descendants of David.

• Alter, Robert. "The David Story: a Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel." W.W. Norton, 2000.
• Kirsch, Jonathan. "King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel." Ballantine Books, 2001.
• McKenzie, Steven L. "King David: a Biography." Oxford University Press, 2001.
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Stephen King

Stephen King is a 'New York Times'-bestselling novelist who made his name in the horror and fantasy genres with books like 'Carrie,' 'The Shining' and 'IT.' Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV.

Who Is Stephen King?

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. He graduated from the University of Maine and later worked as a teacher while establishing himself as a writer. Having also published work under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King's first horror novel, Carrie , was a huge success. Over the years, King has become known for titles that are both commercially successful and sometimes critically acclaimed. His books have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide and been adapted into numerous successful films.

Early Life and Education

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. King is recognized as one of the most famous and successful horror writers of all time. His parents, Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, split up when he was very young, and he and his brother David divided their time between Indiana and Connecticut for several years. King later moved back to Maine with his mother and brother. There he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966.

King stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Maine at Orono. There he wrote for the school's newspaper and served in its student government. While in school, King published his first short story, which appeared in Startling Mystery Stories . After graduating with a degree in English in 1970, he tried to find a position as a teacher but had no luck at first. King took a job in a laundry and continued to write stories in his spare time until late 1971, when he began working as an English educator at Hampden Academy. It was that year that he also married fellow writer Tabitha Spruce.

King of Thrills and Chills

While making novels about vicious, rabid dogs and sewer-dwelling monsters — as seen in Cujo and IT , respectively — King published several books as Richard Bachman. Four early novels — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981) and The Running Man (1982) — were published under the moniker because of King's concern that the public wouldn't accept more than one book from an author within a year. He came up with the alias after seeing a novel by Richard Stark on his desk (actually a pseudonym used by Donald Westlake) coupled with what he heard playing on his record player at the time — "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," by Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Television and Film Adaptations

Although many of King's works were made into film or TV adaptations — Cujo and Firestarter were released for the big screen in 1983 and '84 respectively, while It debuted as a miniseries in 1990 — the film The Shining , released in 1980 and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall , became a renowned horror thriller that has stood the test of time.

For a good portion of his career, King wrote novels and stories at a breakneck speed. He published several books per year for much of the 1980s and '90s. His compelling, thrilling tales have continued to be used as the basis of numerous films for the big and small screens. Actress Kathy Bates and actor James Caan starred in the critically and commercially successful adaptation of Misery in 1990, with Bates winning an Oscar for her performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes.

Four years later, The Shawshank Redemption , starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman and based on one of his stories, became another acclaimed outing with multiple Oscar nominations. King's 1978 novel The Stand became a 1994 miniseries with Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise in the lead, while the mid-'90s serialized outing The Green Mile was turned into a 1999 prison-based film starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan .

King continues to create and be involved in provocative projects. He has worked directly in television, writing for series like Kingdom Hospital and Under the Dome , with the latter based on his 2009 novel. In 2011, he published 11/22/63 , a novel involving time travel as part of an effort to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy .

King also wrote Joyland (2013), a pulp-fiction style thriller that takes readers on a journey to uncovering who's behind an unsolved murder. And he surprised audiences by releasing Doctor Sleep (2013), a sequel to The Shining , with Sleep hitting No. 1 on the New York Time s bestseller list.

The novelist then published Mr. Mercedes (2014), with Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016) rounding out the crime trilogy. In 2017, he teamed with son Owen to deliver Sleeping Beauties , about a mysterious pandemic that leaves women enveloped in cocoons. That year he polished off another collaboration, with Richard Chizmar, on the novella Gwendy's Button Box .

Meanwhile, adaptations of King's works have continued to populate the big and small screens. In 2017, the first season of Mr. Mercedes began airing on the Audience Network, while a remake of the horror classic IT enjoyed a hefty box-office haul. In 2019, an adaptation of Doctor Sleep and IT Chapter Two hit theaters, along with a reboot of another signature King property, Pet Sematary.

That year also brought the publication of the tireless writer's 61st novel, The Institute , about children with supernatural abilities who are taken from their parents and incarcerated by a mysterious organization.

Personal Life

King and his novelist wife divide their time between Florida and Maine. They have three children: Naomi Rachel, a reverend; Joseph Hillstrom, who writes under the pen name Joe Hill and is a lauded horror-fiction writer in his own right; and Owen Phillip, whose first collection of stories was published in 2005.

In honor of his prolific output and success in his craft, King was among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2015.

Outside of writing, King is a music fan. He even sometimes plays guitar and sings in a band called Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow literary stars like Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver and Amy Tan . The group has performed a number of times over the years to raise money for charity.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Stephen Edwin King
• Birth Year: 1947
• Birth date: September 21, 1947
• Birth State: Maine
• Birth City: Portland
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Stephen King is a 'New York Times'-bestselling novelist who made his name in the horror and fantasy genres with books like 'Carrie,' 'The Shining' and 'IT.' Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• Durham Elementary School
• University of Maine
• Lisbon Falls High School

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Stephen King Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/stephen-king
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 30, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• [French is] the language that turns dirt into romance.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
• As a writer, I've always been confrontational. I've never been cool, I've never been calculating.
• There are plenty of people who have got lots of talent. This world is lousy with talent. The idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you — or fate, or genetics or whatever name you want to put on it.

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