# The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Martin Luther King, Jr. - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Get to know the life and work of the leading figure of the civil rights movement.

“I have a dream” is one of the most recognizable and important phrases in recent American history.

It’s a phrase that Christian minister and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

used in a speech he gave during the March on Washington in 1963.

He was calling for equality and freedom for Black people across America.

To many today, this speech marks the symbolic peak of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s that King helped shape, organize, and inspire.

For his monumental importance to the movement, King was crowned Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1963, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 – and, tragically, was assassinated in 1968.

But which personal, social, and political forces shaped this national icon of peace and justice?

These blinks shed light on the man behind the movement – from King’s own point of view.

Assembled from his writings, letters, sermons, comments, and interviews, these blinks give an account of the major events of his life and his private thoughts and feelings about them.

In these blinks, you’ll learn  who inspired King’s central philosophy of nonviolence; why he was critical of the Black Power movement; and how he wanted to be remembered after his death.

Growing up, Martin Luther King Jr. experienced racial and economic injustice firsthand.

Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr.

came into a divided world that was in deep economic trouble.

The American South was still heavily segregated, and the Great Depression was just descending on the world.

Nonetheless, the Kings considered themselves one of the luckier Black families of the time.

They weren’t wealthy, but they lived a comfortable, if frugal, life on Martin Luther King Sr.

’s salary as a Christian minister.

In addition, their faith was a source of love and strength.

The key message in this blink is: Growing up, Martin Luther King Jr.

experienced racial and economic injustice firsthand.

Martin Luther King’s father was a born preacher.

Strong-willed and dynamic, he was revered in Atlanta’s Black community, and became an early figure in the civil rights movement that his son would soon spearhead.

In contrast, King’s mother, Alberta, was gentle and soft-spoken.

But she was equally determined when it came to instilling a sense of self-respect in her children despite the discrimination they faced.

It was she who taught King about the history of slavery in the United States, and tried her best to explain the ongoing system of segregation in the American South.

As a child, King was often confounded by the seemingly arbitrary injustices that segregation produced.

He wasn’t allowed to play in most public parks.

He had to sit in the back of the bus, even if it was empty.

And when a new movie came out, he had to wait for months until it reached Black theaters.

But one of his most visceral early experiences of racism came when his childhood friend, a white boy living in his neighborhood, was suddenly no longer allowed to play with him.

The boy’s father didn’t want his son to associate with Black people anymore.

As King got older, the racist structures that surrounded him only became more apparent to him.

He observed police brutality and Ku Klux Klan beatings.

And the poverty he witnessed in the Black community convinced him that there was a systemic connection between racist oppression and economic exploitation.

As a result, King began early to advocate for racial justice.

He led church and Bible study groups.

At the age of fourteen, he participated in a speech contest for regional public schools, passionately advocating for the end of segregation.

And this was only the beginning.

At college, King refined his theological and philosophical worldviews.

Skipping a grade and graduating from high school early, King entered Atlanta’s Morehouse College at just fifteen years old.

There, he had his first encounter with the concept of nonviolent resistance that would become a cornerstone of his philosophy.

His inspiration was Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience,” in which Thoreau writes about his refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War and the spread of slavery.

King realized that the best way to serve humanity would be to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a preacher.

In his senior year at Morehouse, he was ordained a minister.

The key message here is: At college, King refined his theological and philosophical worldviews.

In 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

He got serious about his intellectual quest to understand and conquer social evil, reading everything from Plato to Mills to Locke.

But none of these philosophers left as much of an impression on him as Walter Rauschenbusch, an American theologian who contended that preachers had a moral obligation to fight against poverty, exploitation, and inequality.

At Crozer, King also deepened his understanding of the pacifist position of nonviolence.

He became fascinated by Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolent resistance campaigns against British rule in India.

Finally, King moved to Boston to complete a PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology.

By now, he was deeply convinced that nonviolent resistance to evil systems was a Christian duty.

Apart from this ideological formation, college held another personal transformation for King.

In Boston, a mutual friend introduced him to Coretta Scott, a singer from Alabama.

For King, it was love at first sight.

After their first date, he told his mother that Coretta would become his wife – and so she did.

His instincts didn’t betray him: Coretta would prove a dedicated companion and source of great strength for King throughout their marriage, supporting the movement every step of the way.

Together, the couple would have four children: Martin Luther III, Dexter, Yolanda, and Bernice.

After graduating from Boston, King was called to serve as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Though he was nervous about returning to the segregated South, he felt a moral obligation to serve the Black community in this troubled city.

In May 1954, King preached his first sermon as a minister in Montgomery.

As it turned out, he was at exactly the right place at the right time.

During the Montgomery bus protests, King emerged as a new civil rights leader.

King loved church work from the beginning.

Along with his duties as a minister, he became heavily involved with civil rights organizations in Montgomery.

In 1954, he joined the local chapter of the NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – and encouraged members of his congregation to do the same.

The Supreme Court had just outlawed the segregation of public schools – a big win for the civil rights movement – but in Montgomery, many shops, restaurants, and all buses remained segregated.

The key message here is: During the Montgomery bus protests, King emerged as a new civil rights leader.

On December 1, 1955, one Montgomery resident decided that she’d had enough of sitting in the back of the bus.

And when the bus driver asked her to give up her front seat for a white man who’d just boarded, Rosa Parks refused to move.

Little did she know that this small gesture of resistance would kick off a whole movement.

When King heard that Rosa Parks had been arrested, he immediately got to work.

He called for a meeting of Black ministers and civil leaders, and they decided it was time to boycott the racist bus system.

Through leaflets and word-of-mouth, they urged the Black population of Montgomery to stop riding the buses.

With this mass protest of noncooperation, they hoped to force the integration of buses.

For the next few months, not a single Black person was seen riding the bus in Montgomery.

Instead, they commuted with the help of Black cab companies who supported the protest, and, later, through an elaborate carpooling system.

King and his associates had decided to form a new organization to manage the movement: the Montgomery Improvement Association, or MIA.

As its president, King made it clear to the bus company and city officials that the boycott wouldn’t stop until Black people received equal treatment on the buses.

The bus company, supported by the city government, didn’t give up without a fight.

First, the police commissioner ordered all Black cab drivers to charge at least 45 cents per ride.

Then, rumors were spread that King had used MIA donations to buy himself a brand new Cadillac.

And finally, the police started arresting Black drivers – including King himself – who participated in the carpooling system for minor traffic violations.

After his brief arrest, King realized that most white people wouldn’t give up their privilege without massive resistance.

But he wasn’t done fighting.

When the struggle began taking a personal toll, King found strength in his faith.

King’s leading role in the bus protests came at a high price.

With his responsibilities as president of the MIA, he barely had time for his family, and most of the child care was left to Coretta.

Nonetheless, she remained unwaveringly supportive of his work.

King’s busy schedule wasn’t the only concern.

As the bus boycott gained national attention, King began to receive threats.

One day, an angry voice on the phone told King his house would be burned down.

He also received death threats, and King’s family began to worry about his safety.

The key message here is: When the struggle began taking a personal toll, King found strength in his faith.

As pressures mounted and his anxiety surged, King turned to God for guidance and support.

He felt that when he prayed, he heard God telling him that he was doing the right thing by standing up for justice.

It was his deep belief in the power of God’s love that kept King from growing bitter in the face of white backlash and violence.

When a bomb went off on the porch of his house – luckily without injuring anyone – the first thing King did was urge his Black supporters not to resort to violence.

When the city government eventually declared the bus boycott illegal, the movement staged a peaceful “jail-in.

” All at once, thousands of Black people – including King – offered themselves up to be arrested over the new law.

This was simply too much for the police to handle.

King remembered that there was a “holiday atmosphere” in the overcrowded jails.

Luckily, many of the arrested didn’t make it to court.

After 381 days of protest, in November 1956, the US Supreme Court finally declared bus segregation unconstitutional.

King felt exhilarated at the good news, but his joy was dampened by a last show of force by white segregationists.

On the night of the big win, the Ku Klux Klan rode, and King’s telephone rang every five minutes with new threats of violence.

But he knew that these were just the tantrums of a few diehards.

In December, one month after the court’s decision, King rode Montgomery’s first integrated bus, sitting in a front seat between two white people.

He’d proven that nonviolent resistance in the Christian spirit wasn’t just possible – it was also effective.

As the movement swept the South, King refined his strategy of nonviolence.

It wasn’t long before the spark ignited in Montgomery spread to other cities.

All over the South, Black communities were discovering the tactics of nonviolent resistance popularized by King as a means of fighting for their rights.

Meanwhile, King decided to move his family back to his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.

From there, he wanted to focus on directing the civil rights campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of ministers and activists he’d helped found.

Here’s the key message: As the movement swept the South, King refined his strategy of nonviolence.

Two cities quickly emerged as last bastions of segregation in the South.

Albany, Georgia was known for broad-ranging social, political, and educational suppression of Black people.

And Birmingham, Alabama was home to a deeply impoverished Black population working for slave wages in the city’s large industrial sector.

Naturally, King and the SCLC pledged their full moral and financial support to both communities.

The Albany Movement used a variety of tactics to fight the social and political structures upholding segregation.

Several months of boycotts, accompanied by jail-ins and demonstrations, finally succeeded in integrating buses and shops.

But King later felt that the Albany Movement hadn’t achieved what it could have.

He thought that the protests had been too general, and their demands too vague.

Having learned from this mistake, the SCLC decided to focus on one aspect of segregation when it moved on to Birmingham in 1963.

In this stronghold of capitalist exploitation, its members would stage a boycott of segregated downtown shops.

Then, they would march on the county building to open up the voter registration drive.

Almost immediately, they found a formidable foe in Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham.

At first, mass arrests steadily filled up the jails with protestors.

King soon found himself in one of the overcrowded cells but received help from an unexpected side: presidential candidate John Kennedy made the calls that led to his release a few days later.

As the protests continued, Connor grew more desperate and more aggressive.

Soon, newspapers showed pictures of Black bodies being beaten, swept away by pressure hoses, and attacked by police dogs.

The protestors kept their promise of nonviolence – and the national mood was now turning in their favor.

On May 10, Birmingham city officials realized that they could not stop the inevitable.

They announced an agreement to desegregate shops, restrooms, and drinking fountains, and ensure that Black people were hired and paid on a nondiscriminatory basis.

King quickly emerged as an icon on the world stage.

With the bus protests in Montgomery, the invigorated civil rights movement gained national attention.

In 1957, Time Magazine posted a cover story about the protests, prominently featuring their spokesperson Martin Luther King Jr.

While the local press often reported critically and unfairly on the protests, the national and international media showed themselves largely sympathetic.

And with the movement expanding all over the South, King’s star only kept rising.

The key message here is: King quickly emerged as an icon on the world stage.

King was aware of becoming a symbol, and sometimes grew self-conscious of it.

He felt pressured to live up to the high standards that people had for him, worrying that “a man who hits the peak at 27 has a tough job ahead.

”  But his fame also helped him make important contacts in the US political class that he used to advance his cause.

Over the years, he regularly corresponded with presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

While he remained skeptical of Eisenhower’s and Johnson’s commitment to civil rights issues, he found an ally in Kennedy, who was an outspoken supporter of the movement.

More than once, John and his brother Robert Kennedy wielded their political power to get King out of jail.

However, King never endorsed Kennedy during his presidential run, because he didn’t want to create the impression that the civil rights movement was a partisan effort.

King also became involved with the international community.

In 1957, he attended independence celebrations in Ghana after the Gold Coast had been freed from British rule.

He was deeply moved by the ceremony, convinced that the story of Ghana was proof of the ultimate triumph of justice over the forces of racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

In 1959, he traveled to India, where he met with Prime Minister Nehru and walked in the footsteps of his hero Mahatma Gandhi.

He was struck by the poverty he saw and the cruelty of the Indian caste system.

In one of his speeches there, he declared solidarity with India’s lowest caste, the untouchables, comparing their experience to that of Black Americans in the United States.

His international stardom didn’t keep King from continuously emphasizing the collective nature of the movement.

When, in 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, he said that “if it were not for the ground crew, the struggle for human dignity and social justice would not be in orbit.

The March on Washington marked a shift in consciousness for America.

Most people have heard of Martin Luther King’s famous speech during the March on Washington.

For many, this mass demonstration became the symbolic highlight of the American civil rights movement.

But do you know how the march, and the famous line “I have a dream,” came to be?

Here’s the key message: The March on Washington marked a shift in consciousness for America.

After the movement had spread to all the big cities in the American South, King and the SCLC turned their attention to the rest of the country.

In northern cities, Black Americans were starting to realize that hidden racism in voting registration, hiring, housing, and education practices had an equally devastating effect on their communities as the South’s forthright segregation laws.

The March on Washington on August 28, 1963, was supposed to highlight the civil rights issue as a national problem.

Two hundred thousand Black people and their white allies came from all over the country and assembled in front of the stone memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.

C.

to advocate for equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal treatment.

King was moved by the fact that, finally, many white churches had come around to support the movement openly and protested with them.

King was set to speak to the crowd, but, busy with other preparations, he didn’t finish writing his speech until 4 a.

m.

on the day of the event.

At that point, he hadn’t even included the iconic phrase “I have a dream.

” But when he started talking to the crowd about the power of this peaceful Black revolution, he was overwhelmed by their euphoric response.

On a whim, he decided to ditch his manuscript and continue the speech free-form.

To a roaring crowd, he talked of his lifelong dream that one day America would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” that all people are created equal, and that his own children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin.

” He concluded his speech with a call to “let freedom ring” from every city and town in America.

The wide coverage of the march allowed many white Americans to understand for the first time what their Black countrymen were fighting for.

Motivated by a new outpouring of support, the SCLC expanded its campaigns into the Deep South.

They started organizing in St.

Augustine, Florida, a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and moved on to Mississippi and Alabama.

As the struggle dragged on, King’s philosophy of nonviolence became harder to sell.

With the outspoken support of President John F.

Kennedy, the SCLC’s campaigns in the Deep South laid the groundwork for some major victories.

After Kennedy’s tragic assassination in November 1963, King would convince Lyndon Johnson to continue working on some of the progressive legislation developed under Kennedy.

Just a few months into his presidency, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The new Civil Rights Act outlawed racist voter registration requirements and segregation in schools, jobs, and public places.

After another major voting rights campaign by the SCLC in Alabama, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 further cemented the end of racist voting policies.

The key message in this blink is: As the struggle dragged on, King’s philosophy of nonviolence became harder to sell.

The monumental Voting Rights Act, however, had come at a high price.

Police in Alabama had been particularly brutal against the peaceful protestors during their marches, and several key figures of the movement were attacked, beaten, and even killed by white supremacists.

Black people across the country were outraged.

They began to realize that problems of poverty, unemployment, and lack of education in their communities wouldn’t go away overnight.

Especially in northern cities, people were frustrated that the big promises of the civil rights movement hadn’t yet yielded any benefits for them.

As a result, riots exploded in many cities far removed from the segregated South.

In the Watts area of Los Angeles, thousands of impoverished Black people took to the streets to loot and vandalize.

King understood the social violence that bred their anger, and had deep sympathy for the rioters.

But he still believed that violence was not just an immoral tool for change, but also an inefficient one.

Still, the Los Angeles riots showed King the paramount role of economic deprivation in upholding racism.

That’s why, in 1966, King moved with his family to one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods to organize a campaign for housing, better employment, and equal education.

He was adamant about training all protestors in the principle of nonviolence, and even got known gang leaders to join the peaceful marches.

But King also contended that he’d never seen white mobs “as hostile and as hate-filled” as the ones in Chicago.

In many ways, the fight against hidden racist structures in the north seemed harder to win than the southern fight against segregation.

And with the continued white backlash, many Black activists became increasingly radicalized.

King was understanding but critical of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement.

Throughout his life, King remained a strong believer in nonviolent resistance in the Christian tradition.

His strategy for change was simple: With the first step, masses of nonviolent demonstrators took to the streets, making their demands.

With the second step, police, city officials, and other white racists revealed themselves by unleashing violence on peaceful protestors.

As a result, “good” Americans across the country became aware of the problem, sympathizing with the protestors and demanding government intervention.

Finally, the government crumbled under public pressure and put new legislation in place.

His tactic of nonviolence had been successful in many places, but as the movement grew and diversified, King noticed that more and more people outright rejected his pacifist stance.

The key message here is: King was understanding but critical of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement.

1963 was a year of tragedy for the Black community.

In Mississippi, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was killed by assassins.

In Birmingham, just after police had killed an eight-year-old boy on his bike, the bombing of a Black church killed four young Black girls.

All over the country, police seemed to respond to Black protests with fresh brutality.

And the assassination of President Kennedy in November just added to the confusion.

King noticed that all over the country, Black people were growing increasingly angry.

To him, Malcolm X, a Muslim minister and fellow civil rights leader, was one of these angry people.

King commended Malcolm X for his integrity and talent as a speaker, but he found his philosophy of Black nationalism divisive and counterproductive.

Malcolm X, in turn, thought that King’s idea of white-and-black brotherhood was naive and feckless.

After Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, some of his followers formed the Black Power movement.

King first encountered the “Black Power'' slogan during one of the Mississippi Freedom Marches he helped organize.

In one of the planning meetings, fellow organizer Stokley Carmichael suggested they use the slogan during the march.

King had reservations.

He didn’t believe in Black separatism and thought that the slogan might alienate potential white allies.

As Black Power began growing into its own movement, King often met with its leaders and proponents.

He thought that the movement was a justified cry for political and economic power, but that this philosophy ultimately rested on a negative definition of power and a rejection of hope.

To King, love had to be a main component of any positive revolution.

Before his assassination, King fought to end war and poverty.

Martin Luther King Jr.

was assassinated in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

In the last years of his life, he focused on two issues that he’d grappled with since his teenage years.

The key message in this blink is: Before his assassination, King fought to end war and poverty.

Throughout the 1960s, King watched reports of thousands of young Black men – and millions of Southeast Asian civilians – dying in the Vietnam war.

In earlier years, he’d been wary of getting involved in political issues not directly related to his movement.

But when, in 1967, the US government declined a peace offer to stop the bombing in North Vietnam, King decided he could no longer stay silent.

He started participating in and organizing anti-war protests and privately pleaded with President Johnson to end the war immediately.

Just as he’d expected, the media, who’d slowly become more sympathetic to him over the course of the civil rights movement, weren’t amused.

His critics, and even some of his associates at the NAACP, said that he should stick “to the business of civil rights” instead of getting mixed up in foreign policy.

King was taken aback by the force of the backlash, but his conscience would not let him leave the issue.

He had become convinced that racism in America was inextricably linked to Western imperialism, militarism, and materialism.

While for the US government the war was a lucrative business, many of the young men – especially the young Black men – fighting in Vietnam struggled in poverty at home.

Thus, the second, related issue King turned to in later years was the inherent economic injustice of capitalism.

In one speech, he urged his audience that America “must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented to a person-oriented society” if it were to survive as a democracy.

In 1968, the SCLC organized the nationwide Poor People’s Campaign, leading masses of disenfranchised people to Washington, D.

C.

Poor Black people were joined by poor white people, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Latinos to protest for economic justice, dignified work, and better housing.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, King was shot in Memphis.

In writings before his death, King said that he wanted to be remembered as a person who spent his life serving, loving, and caring for others.

He wrote: “If I can help somebody as I pass along, my living will not be in vain.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks: Born in Atlanta at the beginning of the Great Depression, Martin Luther King Jr.

experienced segregation and discrimination firsthand.

As a devout Christian, he believed that it was his duty to offer peaceful resistance to these evil systems of oppression.

Beginning with the Montgomery bus boycotts, he quickly became a leading figure in civil rights protests across the country.

Even when factions of the movement grew more radical, King was firm in his commitment to nonviolence.

His political engagement didn’t end with clear-cut civil rights issues.

Before being assassinated, he also fought against economic injustice and the Vietnam War.

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What to read next: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X In addition to Martin Luther King Jr.

, Malcolm X is one of the best-known names of the Civil Rights Movement.

As you’ve learned in these blinks, King didn’t approve of Malcolm X’s tactics and philosophy, but he had great respect for his vigor and intellect.

If you want to know what made Malcolm X reject King’s philosophy of nonviolence in favor of a more radical approach to Black liberation, head on over to our blinks for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.