King, Martin Luther Jr.

1929 - Born on January 15th in Atlanta, Georgia. His leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States.
 

1935 - At about age six, when one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools.

1941 - His maternal grandmother, whose death left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents' permission, the 12-year-old Martin attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

1944 - At age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like him.

1947 - He was ordained Baptist minister.

1948 - King graduated from Morehouse. 

1951 - King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians and earned a bachelor of divinity degree. 

1953 - While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a native Alabamian who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. They were married and had four children. 

1954 - He became the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

1955 - After arrest of Rosa Parks, led 382-day boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama successfully leading to court injunction ordering bus desegregation.

1957 - Helped found Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

         - He participated in Prayer Pilgrimage at Lincoln Memorial.

         - Received the Spingarn Medal.

1958 - Wrote "Stride Toward Freedom".

1959 - He and his party were warmly received by India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru; as the result of a brief discussion with followers of Gandhi about the Gandhian concepts of peaceful noncompliance (satyagraha), King became increasingly convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

1960 - King moved to his native city of Atlanta, where he became co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. 

1961-1962 - King and his colleagues failed to achieve their desegregation goals for public parks and other facilities. in Albany, Georgia.

1963 - Wrote nonviolence manifesto "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" after his arrest at demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.

         - He helped organize a march on Washington and delivered "I Have a Dream" speech.

1964 - Wrote "Why We Can't Wait".

         - A Nobel Prize in Peace winner.

1965 - Organized and led march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery but was forced to turn back at Edmund Pettus bridge outside Selma, but shortly thereafter successfully led 5-day march as planned.

1966 - Began attempts to desegregate Chicago.

         - He had condemned the war, but official outrage from Washington and strenuous opposition within the black community itself had caused him to relent.
 

1967 - At Riverside Church in New York City on April 4th and again on the 15th at a mammoth peace rally in that city, he committed himself irrevocably to opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

1968 - Visited Memphis to support labor movement among city sanitation workers, but assassinated by sniper while standing on balcony of Lorraine Motel.

         - King was only 39 at the time of his death—a leader in mid passage who never wavered in his insistence that nonviolence must remain the essential tactic of the movement nor in his faith that all Americans would some day attain racial and economic justice. Though he likely will remain a subject of controversy, his eloquence, self-sacrifice, and courageous role as a social leader have secured his ranking among the most influential men of recent history.