It’s hard to overstate the impact Martin Luther King Jr. had on the course of American history. Born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, King was raised in an educated and loving family with deep roots in the church. But growing up in the deeply segregated American South also shaped his worldview profoundly. King graduated from Morehouse College at age 19; while there, he became inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent activism. After earning his doctorate in theology, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became not only a Baptist pastor in his family’s tradition, but also a burgeoning civil rights leader after his involvement in the 1955 Montgomery bus protest sparked by Rosa Parks’ arrest.

King’s most memorable moment occurred at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he delivered his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. The iconic rallying cry called for a country where people are not judged for the color of their skin. It solidified King as the face of the Civil Rights Movement. He advocated for voting rights, desegregation, workers’ rights, and more. His large-scale demonstrations of nonviolent resistance became the cornerstone of his activism and have reverberated for generations.

Though he is revered now, King was a divisive figure in his life. In 1963, he was both named Time magazine’s Person of the Year and arrested and jailed for a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama. King’s time behind bars resulted in what is considered one of his most important written works, “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he defends his philosophy of civil disobedience. In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. President Lyndon B. Johnson also signed the Civil Rights Act that year, and the following year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came into law. King’s life was cut tragically short when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.