Todd Gleason: I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. It's Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in The United States. I thought I'd take you through some of the chronology of Martin Luther's life. He was born, by the way, in 1929 on the fifteenth day to the Reverend and Mrs.

Martin Luther King Sr. In Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated in 1944 from Booker T Washington High School and was admitted to Morehouse College at age 15. He was ordained a Baptist minister 02/25/1948, just 19 years of age. In 1955, King received his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University.

That was on June 5 and he joined a bus boycott after Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1. On December 5, he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, making him the official spokesperson for the boycott. On 11/13/1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was illegal and ensured a victory for the boycott. And in 1957, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to fight segregation and achieve civil rights. On May 17, Doctor.

King spoke to a crowd of about 15,000 in Washington DC. In 1958, the US Congress passed the first civil rights act since Reconstruction and King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom, was published on a speaking tour. Martin Luther King Jr. Was nearly killed and he was stabbed by an assailant in Harlem. In 1959, King visited India to study Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of non violence and he resigned from pastoring the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to concentrate on civil rights full time.

He moved to Atlanta to direct the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1960, a year later, he became a co pastor at his father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. That same year lunch counter sit ins began in Greensboro, North Carolina. In Atlanta, King was arrested during a sit in waiting to be served at a restaurant. He was sentenced to four months in jail, but after intervention by John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, he was released.

In 1963 on Good Friday, April the twelfth, King was arrested by police commissioner Eugene Bull Connor for demonstrating without a permit. On the thirteenth, the Birmingham campaign was launched and it would prove to be the turning point in the war to end segregation in the South. During the eleven days he spent in jail, Martin Luther King wrote his famous letter from Birmingham Jail. On 06/23/1963, Martin Luther King led 125,000 people on a freedom walk in Detroit. The March on Washington was held August 28 and remains the largest civil rights demonstration in history with more than 200,000 people in attendance.

At the march, King made his famous I have a dream speech. November 22 that year, President Kennedy was assassinated. 01/03/1964, King appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as its man of the year. By the way, after president Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the voting rights act into law, Martin Luther King Junior turned to socioeconomic problems. In 1968, he delivered the I've been to a mountaintop speech and at sunset on April 4, Martin Luther King Junior was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Today is MLK Day. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleeson.