MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. He finished a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University and took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Alabama, at twenty-five.

When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Montgomery's Black community chose the newcomer to front the boycott — partly because he had not yet made enemies. The boycott held for 381 days, carried by carpools and walking, and ended with segregated city buses ruled unconstitutional.

Arrested in Birmingham in April 1963 for defying an injunction against protest, King wrote in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps smuggled out by his lawyers. The Letter from Birmingham Jail answered white clergymen who called the campaign untimely, and it named the real obstacle: not the open racist, but the moderate who prefers order to justice.

Televised images of police dogs and fire hoses turned against schoolchildren in the same city forced federal action and made the case for the Civil Rights Act.

At the March on Washington in August 1963 he departed from his prepared text and delivered the passage the world remembers. The march was formally for jobs and freedom — economic demands that are usually cropped out of the quotation.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five, then spent his final years on the least popular parts of his work: opposing the Vietnam war, organising the Poor People's Campaign, and confronting northern housing discrimination in Chicago. He was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.