Great Lives from History

helped cement her legacy as an indomitable force in thearena of global human and civil rights advocacy.

—Brenda D. Tindal

Further ReadingCrawford, Vicki. “In Memoriam: Coretta Scott King

and the Struggle for Civil and Human Rights: An En-during Legacy.” The Journal of African AmericanHistory 92, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 106-117. A com-memorative essay exploring the life and times ofKing and the ways in which scholars have begun tocontextualize her legacy.

King, Coretta Scott. My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Writ-ten a year after Martin’s assassination, this memoir isa deeply human account of King’s life with her hus-band and the movement to which he is perpetuallybound. The appendix includes an address given by

King on April 8, 1968, at Memphis City Hall, King’sfuneral program, and the eulogy delivered by Dr.Benjamin E. Mays, among other important docu-ments related to King’s life.

_______. My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. ed.New York: Henry Holt, 1993. A revised edition of her1969 memoir, this book frames the message of nonvi-olence for a younger readership.

McCarty, Laura T. Coretta Scott King: A Biography.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. Intendedfor student use, this accessibly written biographytraces King’s life from her birth in 1927 to her death in2006. It includes a useful timeline of events importantto her life and the Civil Rights movement.

See also: Medgar Evers; Myrlie Evers-Williams; Mar-tin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; Diane Nash; RosaParks; Betty Shabazz.

Martin Luther King, Jr.Activist and religious leaderLeader of the African American movement for civilrights and legal equality in the United States, King wasknown for his stirring speeches and his use ofnonviolent resistance to racial segregation anddiscrimination.

Born: January 15, 1929; Atlanta, GeorgiaDied: April 4, 1968; Memphis, TennesseeAlso known as: Michael Luther King, Jr. (birth

name)Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Religion and

theology; Social issues

Early LifeMartin Luther King, Jr., was born January 15, 1929,in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a prominent ministerwho soon became pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer BaptistChurch. His family was part of the African Americanelite that lived and worked along Auburn Avenue inAtlanta, and King’s early life was one of comparativeprivilege and comfort. His father’s travel and study inGermany resulted in King’s name being changed fromMichael to Martin Luther in 1934, in honor of thefounder of the Protestant Reformation. King earned abachelor of arts degree in sociology in 1948 from At-lanta’s Morehouse College, a bachelor of divinity degree

from Crozier Seminary in 1951, and a Ph.D. from BostonUniversity in 1955. He married Coretta Scott on June 18,1953, in Heiberger, Alabama. They had four children.While King sang in a choral event that accompanied theopening of Gone with the Wind—a film criticized for itsdepictions of African Americans—in Atlanta in 1939, healso refused to yield his seat on a bus in rural Georgia in1944, until a teacher persuaded him to do so. His earlylife seemed to have prepared him for a comfortable pas-torate or a university teaching position, but he concludedthat he should pursue a vocation where he was mostneeded.

Life’s WorkIn 1954, King assumed the pastorate at the Dexter Ave-nue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Thechurch had historically catered to the African Americanelite in Jim Crow Alabama. Almost immediately, Kingurged his congregants to register to vote and to jointhe National Association for the Advancement of Col-ored People (NAACP). In December, 1955, he becamepresident of the Montgomery Improvement Association,which spearheaded a yearlong boycott of that city’sbuses to compel an end to segregated seating. After theirsuccess in December, 1956, King and other leadingsouthern African American ministers established the

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Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in1957. The Atlanta-based ministerial alliance helped or-chestrate and support civil rights activism across theSouth. In 1958, King published his first book, Stride To-ward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, a memoir of thebus boycott. In 1960, he became the associate pastor ofEbenezer Baptist Church.

King believed that nonviolent protest would incite vi-olent reaction by the South’s politicians and police, win-ning the moral high ground for African Americans whilehighlighting the pervasive racism of the region. Suchmoral drama, he believed, might bring about importantexternal pressure on the South to grant full civil rights toAfrican Americans. King grounded his activism in hispersonal faith, but he also drew heavily on philosopherReinhold Niebuhr’s ideas concerning the reality of eviland the irony of racism in United States history, Ma-

hatma Gandhi’s belief in the power of passive resis-tance, and Henry David Thoreau’s notion of civil disobe-dience.

King’s evolving strategies to achieve political and so-cial ends met with successes and failures. Attempting toassist the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) in registering African American voters in Al-bany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, King went to jail ratherthan pay a fine following his arrest. The Albany po-lice chief, Laurie Pritchett, released King after threedays, responding to King’s nonviolent tactics with mod-eration and denying King public martyrdom. In addi-tion, the SCLC, NAACP, and SNCC became mired in ju-risdictional disputes that undermined the movement’sunity.

More successful was the SCLC-directed campaign inBirmingham, Alabama, in 1963. There, Eugene “Bull”

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Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King in 1964. (Library of Congress)

Connor, the public safety commis-sioner, had protesters doused by high-pressure fire hoses and attacked bypolice dogs, then arrested. Televisionstations filmed these demonstrations,recording images that were searedinto the national consciousness. Kingwas jailed again and wrote his Letterfrom Birmingham City Jail (1963),which justified his involvement as aminister, a Christian, and a citizen inprotesting the race discrimination injobs and by law enforcement in Bir-mingham. The city’s leaders, facingthe loss of business and a deluge ofnegative publicity, agreed to end mostof their overt discrimination.

From August of 1963 throughMarch of 1965, King’s appeal toChristian morality and a color-blindapplication of the Constitution reached its zenith, attract-ing support from whites in addition to African Ameri-cans. King’s stirring “I Have a Dream” speech, deliveredfrom the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28,1963, as part of the massive March on Washington forJobs and Freedom, became the rhetorical high point ofthe entire Civil Rights movement. King called for ademocracy based on character, rather than skin pigmen-tation. In 1965, after the initial march from Selma toMontgomery, Alabama, was violently halted by whitelaw-enforcement officials at the Edmund Pettus Bridge,King participated in a second, successful march that in-spired President Lyndon B. Johnson to push for and signthe Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discrimi-natory voting practices in the South and gave the nationalgovernment the task of ensuring voting rights in stateswhere minorities had been historically excluded from thedemocratic process. In 1964, King was awarded the No-bel Peace Prize.

Three major events eroded the broad national supportfor the Civil Rights movement. First, race riots in theWatts section of Los Angeles in 1965 caused many whiteobservers to see African Americans as figures of lawlessviolence, rather than long-suffering, nonviolent protest-ers. The emergence of the Black Power movement aug-mented this shift in perception. Second, the escalation ofthe Vietnam War diverted national attention from prob-lems at home to the Cold War abroad. Finally, in 1966,King took his nonviolent resistance movement to Chi-cago to crusade for economic justice, which he increas-

ingly portrayed as a root cause of African Americandisempowerment, hopelessness, and anger among theyoung. His movement, however, did not find unjust lawsthat could be challenged morally in the streets and con-stitutionally in the courts, and northern whites respondedto his marches with violence and vitriol eerily similar tothe violence in the South.

Increasingly, King came to see a connection betweenthe violence associated with the Vietnam War and the at-tempts to maintain white supremacy at home. On April 4,1967, he delivered a stirring address at New York’sRiverside Church, making an explicit the connectionbetween domestic and imperialist violence and material-ism, which reduced people to things. His criticism ofU.S. foreign policy drew a backlash from many of hisformer supporters, including President Johnson, andsharply divided the white liberal community.

The following year, King continued his crusade foreconomic justice, which included a march on Washing-ton and a demand for a bill of rights for America’s poor.His ongoing focus on economic injustice led him to in-tervene in a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis,who protested their systematic dehumanization by mu-nicipal managers. On April 4, 1968, he was assassinatedby James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,Tennessee, after delivering his “Been to the Mountain-top” address. In the wake of the assassination, riotserupted in many U.S. cities. Ray was captured by agentsof the Federal Bureau of Investigation after a large man-hunt.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

Having endured discriminatory treatment on city buses in Montgomery, Al-abama, for decades, African American citizens conducted a daylong bus boy-cott on December 5, 1955, the day Rosa Parks was tried for failing to yield herseat in accordance with the city’s segregation ordinance. At a mass meetingthat evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., was selected to head the organization thatwould extend the boycott. At the time, King was selected because he had notbeen a resident of Montgomery long enough to have made enemies in a citywhose African American leadership was divided against itself. As head of theMontgomery Improvement Association, King came to national attention forhis charismatic speaking. He was arrested and his home firebombed by whitesupremacists, but his organizational skills and belief that biblical teachingssupported African American claims to equal citizenship under the Constitu-tion steeled the 385-day boycott. The protest led to the Supreme Court affirm-ing a lower court decision that struck down the municipal bus segregationordinance. It also made King a national leader in the emerging Civil Rightsmovement.

SignificanceKing was the foremost leader of the Civil Rights move-ment, an eloquent and influential challenger of the na-tional acquiescence to racism and inequality. His protestcampaigns led to major federal laws affecting votingrights and housing. He became a symbol for diversityand tolerance, and his emphasis on nonviolent civil dis-obedience provided an example for generations of activ-ists. Although he is best remembered for challenging ra-cial discrimination, King’s concern went beyond civilrights to include attacks on poverty at home and imperi-alism abroad. The creation of a national holiday in hishonor, the first such holiday for an African American,illustrated his status as a national icon, rather than solelyan African American one.

—Edward R. Crowther

Further ReadingBurns, Stewart. To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King,

Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955-1968. SanFrancisco: HarperCollins, 2004. Especially rich inoral history, Burns’s work emphasizes King’s human-ity and internal struggles.

Fairclough, Adam. Better Day Coming: Blacks andEquality, 1890-2000. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.An accessible overview of the Civil Rights movementin the twentieth century and King’s role in it.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King,Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Confer-

ence. New York: William Morrow, 1986. A PulitzerPrize winner, this biography is extensively researched.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Call to Conscience: The Land-mark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Editedby Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard. New York:Warner Books, 2001. A stirring collection of twelveof King’s greatest speeches; an audio edition also isavailable.

Lewis, David L. King: A Biography. New York: Praeger,1970. Despite appearing before many of King’s pa-pers were made public, Lewis’s study is especially in-sightful.

Sitkoff, Harvard. King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop.New York: Hill & Wang, 2008. An outstanding short,interpretive biography that portrays King as a radicaland polarizing figure whose prophetic voice im-peached widely held assumptions about race, reli-gion, and national destiny.

Thornton, J. Mills, III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Poli-tics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery,Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 2002. Without peer in its explanationof the contours of the Civil Rights movement andKing’s role in three key cities.

See also: Ralph David Abernathy; Myrlie Evers-Williams; James Forman; Coretta Scott King; JamesLawson; Malcolm X; Rosa Parks; C. T. Vivian; Whit-ney Young.

Eartha KittActor, singer, and dancerOne of few entertainers to be nominated forTony, Grammy, and Emmy awards, Kittperformed extensively on Broadway and innightclubs and concerts; however, she is bestremembered for her sex-kitten image,demonstrated in her hit “Santa Baby” (1953)and as Catwoman (1967-1968) in the Batmantelevision series.

Born: January 17, 1927; North, South CarolinaDied: December 25, 2008; Weston, ConnecticutAlso known as: Eartha Mae Kitt; Eartha Mae Keith

(birth name)Areas of achievement: Dance; Film: acting;

Music: pop

Early LifeFew details about the early life of Eartha Mae Kitt (UR-thuh) are known to be accurate. She was born Eartha MaeKeith in 1927 in North, South Carolina. Kitt often saidthat her family continually abandoned her because shewas a child of rape and multiracial (her white fatherwas of Germanic descent). After spending her first eightyears on a farm in the South, she was sent to New YorkCity to live with Mamie Kitt, who was probably herbiological mother. Periods of running away and home-lessness as a teen took a toll on her formal education butdid not crush her intellectual curiosity. At fifteen, Kitt(who had taken dance lessons) won an audition to jointhe Katherine Dunham Company, a primarily AfricanAmerican dance troupe that toured worldwide and re-

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