Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant student who started college at just 15, then trained as a Baptist minister like his father. He became one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, which used peaceful marches and protests to fight against unjust laws that separated Black Americans from white Americans in schools, buses, restaurants, and voting booths.
On 28 August 1963, around 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. King climbed the steps and gave the speech now known as “I Have a Dream.” He painted a vision of a future where his four little children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
A year later he won the Nobel Peace Prize - the youngest male winner at that time. His campaigning helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. The U.S. now honors him with a federal holiday every January.
