Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Each January, Americans celebrate Martin Luther King Day. We remember a great African American leader who fought for civil rights- full freedom and equality for all people. Who was this man?

Life in the South Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. His father was a minister and his mother was a teacher. Martin and his sister and brother grew up in a busy, loving family. Martin did his homework, took music lessons, and played sports. When he was nineteen, he decided to become a minister like his father. After he married, he took his first job at a church in the state of Alabama.

Alabama is in the South, where African Americans lived under unfair laws for many years. Before the Civil War, most blacks had been slaves to white owners. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln gave the slaves their freedom. But Southern states then passed new laws to keep blacks apart, or segregated, from whites.

These unfair laws robbed blacks of many rights. Black children had to attend separate, poorer schools than white children. On buses, blacks had to sit in the back seats-and give up those seats if whites wanted them. Blacks and whites used separate drinking fountains and restrooms with signs that read “ For Colored Only" or “ For Whites Only. " In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided that schools could not be segregated by race. The Court ordered schools to allow both black and white students to attend. This decision made some white people angry, including a group called the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK.

Members of the KKK wore white robes and hoods to hide their faces. They tried to keep black people from working for equality by scaring and hurting them. Yet many other whites around the country wanted equality for blacks. Some worked along with blacks to gain civil rights.