Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday in the United States observed on the third Monday of January each year. King was chief spokesperson for nonviolent activism in the Civil Rights Movement, which protested racial discrimination in federal and state law and civil society. The movement led to several groundbreaking legislative reforms in the United States.
King in 1965
Sign (1969) promoting a holiday on the anniversary of King's death
Ronald Reagan and Coretta Scott King at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day signing ceremony
A march in Eugene, Oregon
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
King in 1964
King's childhood home in Atlanta
The high school that King attended was named after African-American educator Booker T. Washington.
King received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951 (pictured in 2009).