A key player in the movement for civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. devoted his life to promoting racial harmony and the achievement of the American dream for everyone.
Day in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. is Monday, January 15, 2024. As the country celebrates his life and legacy, we have compiled an assortment of lesser-known facts regarding the man whose steadfast commitment to equality and justice shaped the history of the United States.
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He was the inaugural Black recipient of the TIME Man of the Year title.
King was the preliminary Black person to be named TIME’s 1963 “Man of the Year,” having led the civil rights movement. “The extraordinary King mystique is best explained by few.” Nevertheless, he possesses an unfathomable capacity for empathy, which is the cornerstone of leadership. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has instilled in the people he loves a Christian patience that stifles injustice and feeds hope via both deed and sermon.
Remarkably, King acknowledged that the magazine’s decision to prominently feature a Black person on the front and said that winning TIME person of the Year—now Individual of the Year—was an honor to the whole civil rights movement.
A portion of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was improvised.
Those iconic words were almost absent from Martin Luther King Jr.’s thunderous 1963 March on Washington speech, “I have a dream.” His advisors believed he had overdone the theme in his addresses, so he wrote a new speech titled “Normalcy Never Again” for the address. However, gospel musician Mahalia Jackson yelled at King as he spoke to the nearly 250,000-strong assembly in Washington, “Martin, tell ‘me about the dream.”
After pausing, he made the decision to wing the rest of his speech, improvising the famous opening line, “So even though we encounter the challenges of tomorrow as well as today, I still possess a dream.” The dream has strong roots in the American ideal. I dream of the day when this country rises up and embraces its creed, which states, “We hold these principles to be obvious, that all men have been made equal.”
An attempt on his life confirmed his belief in nonviolence.
Ten years prior to his passing, King barely avoided being assassinated in Harlem while signing copies of his autobiography, Stride Towards Freedom, which detailed the power source year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. A forty-two-year-old Black woman named Izola Ware Curry came up to him and violently pressed a seven-inch steel letter opener with an ivory handle into his chest, breaking the handle off. “I’ve spent the last six years chasing him. I’m happy I did it!” she allegedly exclaimed. The doctors later informed him that he wouldn’t have survived if he had even sneezed. The blade stopped right next to his heart.
King reiterated his dedication to nonviolence after the incident by saying that he had no ill will towards the woman and that he did not want allegations to be brought. 2015 saw Curry’s death after being admitted to a mental health facility.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is the only non-Presidential holiday.
Four days after King’s April 4, 1968, assassination, efforts were launched to have the federal government declare a holiday in his honor. However, despite King’s death’s national significance, legislation to create a holiday in his honor languished for years.
Rep. Shirley A. Chisholm (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) worked together for 15 years to try and pass legislation designating a national holiday in honor of Dr. King’s birthday. When the bill was finally put to a cast vote in the legislature in 1979, President Jimmy Carter supported it, but it was defeated by five votes. The main opponent, Congressman Gene Taylor (R-Mo.), cited the additional expenses associated with a federal holiday. “I do not believe our present economic situation will allow us the luxury of another $212 million Federal holiday,” Taylor said.
The song “Happy Birthday,” a tribute to King by Motown singer as well as songwriter Stevie Wonder, raised awareness for the bill and gave the movement to declare King’s birthday a federal holiday impetus. President Ronald Reagan signed legislation into law in 1983, fifteen years after his passing. The year 2000 marked the first official observance of MLK Day in all 50 states.
King enrolled in college at age 15.
King skipped grades 9 through 12 and, at the age of 15, was accepted to Atlanta’s Morehouse College, a prominent historically Black university that his mother’s grandfather and father had both attended.
King was first hesitant to pursue a career in the ministry because he didn’t feel comfortable leading Black church congregations, even though he came from a long line of Baptist ministers. However, he was convinced to change his mind by George D. Kelsey, his philosophy teacher, and Benjamin E. Mays, the president of Morehouse College, who are both ordained ministers. During his undergraduate studies, King was ordained as a minister in his father’s church. He then went on to study philosophy and religion at the University of Pennsylvania and the racially integrated Crozer Theological Seminary. During this period, King adopted the notion of nonviolent resistance as a positive force for social change, being shaped by Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings.
The King family covered Julia Roberts’ birth hospital bill.
The 1967-born actress Julia Roberts disclosed that her parents’ hospital bills were paid for by the King family. “My parents couldn’t afford the hospital,” she explained to Gayle King in the year 2022 History Channel interview.
According to Roberts, Coretta Scott King inquired about her children’s enrollment at her parents’ theatre school in Atlanta. “My mom was like, ‘Sure come on over,'” Roberts recalled. “They were having trouble identifying a place that could accommodate her kids.” “And so, they all just became friends, and they helped us out of a jam.”
King was taken into custody thirty times.
King, like many other egalitarian activists of the era, was frequently arrested as part of a police harassment and intimidation campaign, frequently on false accusations. The King Centre claims that he was taken into custody thirty times in total, primarily for civil disobedience actions like the sit-in at the Atlanta departmental store and unpermitted demonstrations. Some were the result of baseless accusations; one involved his detention in Montgomery, Alabama for exceeding the posted speed limit of 25 miles per hour while driving at thirty miles per hour.
James Earl Ray’s family feels he was set up for his murder.
Although James Earl Ray’s family still believes that Ray is unassuming and was set up to take the fallout, the US government has maintained that Ray was the murderous who killed King.
In 1999, the King family brought a civil lawsuit against the US government to compel the release of additional assassination details. A Memphis jury concluded that King was not shot and killed by a lone gunman, but rather was the victim of a conspiracy. As a result of the jury’s decision, the local, state, and federal governments were found to be accountable for King’s death, even though James Earl Ray was set up to accept the blame.
“There is overwhelming evidence of a significant, high-level conspiracy in my husband’s assassination,” Coretta King declared following the decision. The jury determined that the assassination was planned and carried out by the mafia and multiple government agencies. Mr. Ray was made to shoulder the blame. The King family decided to give the $100 in damages they were awarded to charity. The family claimed that rather than looking to make money, they were seeking the little amount in order to find the truth.
He was the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
King, who was 35 at the time, was the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in the year 1964, given recognition for his advocacy of nonviolent resistance to racial injustice. The honor came after an incredible year in which he led the March on the state of Washington, giving his well-known “I Have a Dream” address, helped ratify the 24th Amendment, which eliminated the voter registration fee, and worked towards the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race in both education and employment. The $53,123 prize money was reportedly given by King to the civil rights movement. He bears the name Martin Luther, a Protestant reformer.
On January 15, 1929, King was born as Michael King Jr. However, during a religious tour of the globe in 1934, Michael King’s dad, an elder at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was motivated by Martin Luther, a German Protestant Reformation leader whose ideas and activism opposed the Catholic Church as well as caused a rift in Western Christianity.
In honor of the leader of the Protestant reformation, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s father decided to rename both himself and his five-year-old son after returning to America. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth certificate was officially revised on July 23, 1957.
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