PERSONALITY OF THE DAY: MARTIN LUTHER KING.

Do you know Martin Luther King Jr. was born named Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929? Well, he died on April 4, 1968, He was an American Baptist minister and advocate who was a fore-frontier in the Civil Rights Movement.

He is renown because his activities in the movement for civil rights using non violent civil disobedience based solely on his Christian faith.

Martin Luther became a civil rights advocate at an early stage in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, acting as its primary president.

With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle contrary to segregation in Albany, Georgia, and also organize the 1963 non violent protests that occurred in the city of Birmingham, Alabama.
MLK furthermore helped to organize the 1963 rally on Washington, the location he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

On October 14, 1964, Martin Luther King got the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through non violent civil disobedience. towards the year 1965, he saw to organizing the Selma to Montgomery protests, and the year after he and SCLC took the campaign north to Chicago to work on segregated housing.

Towards the last years of his life, King stretched his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech dubbed "Beyond Vietnam".

By 1968, King had planned a nationwide occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People's Campaign, at what time he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee.

King's death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Ray, who fled the Nation, was arrested two months after at London Heathrow Airport.

Martin Luther King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was declared as a public holiday in various cities and states starting from 1971, and a U.S. federal public holiday in 1986.

Hundreds of streets across the U.S. in lieu of this has been renamed in respect to his honour, and a district in Washington State was additionally renamed in support of him.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was commissioned in 2011.

His Famous "I have a Dream" speech goes thus:

I say to you today, my friends, 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 self-evident: 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 one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

 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.

 I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

 I have a dream today.