Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 in
his maternal grandparents' large Victorian house on Auburn Avenue
in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second of three children, and
was first named Michael, after his father. Both changed their
names to Martin when the boy was still young.
King's paternal grandfather, James Albert King, had been
a sharecropper near the small town of Stockbridge, Georgia, outside Atlanta.
Like most sharecroppers, he had worked hard and earned little.
King, Sr. was the second of ten children. He had left Stockbridge
for Atlanta at the age of sixteen, with nothing but a sixth-grade
education and a pair of shoes.
In Atlanta he worked odd jobs and studied, and slowly
developed a reputation as a preacher. While preaching at two small churches
outside of Atlanta, he met Alberta Christine Williams, his future
wife, and King, Jr.'s mother. She was a graduate of Atlanta's Spelman
College, had attended the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and had
returned to Atlanta to teach. Her father, the Reverend Adam Daniel
Williams, presided over Atlanta's well-established Ebenezer Baptist
Church.
When King, Sr. and Williams married, they moved
into the Williams home on Auburn Avenue, the main street of Atlanta's African
American business district. After some time had passed, her father
asked King, Sr. to serve as assistant pastor at Ebenezer, which
he did. When the senior pastor died of a heart attack in 1931,
King, Sr. took over his duties.
King, Jr. and his siblings were born into a financially
secure middle-class family, and thus they received better educations
than the average child of their race; King's recognition of this
undoubtedly influenced him in his decision to live a life of social
protest, extending the opportunities he had enjoyed to all blacks.
In his father, King had a model of courage: King, Sr. was involved
in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, or NAACP, and had led a successful campaign
to equalize the salaries of white and black teachers in Atlanta.
As a child, King's encounters with racial discrimination
were mild but formative. The first significant one came when he
began school. White playmates of his were to attend a different
elementary school from his, and, once the year began, their parents
no longer allowed King to come over and play. It was this instance
of injustice that first led his mother to explain to him the history
of slavery and segregation.
When King was in high school, he attended an oratory contest
in Valdosta, Georgia, where he took second prize. His victory
was soured, however, by the long bus ride back to Atlanta: the
bus was segregated, and the black people had to stand so that the
white people could sit.
Thus King grew up in a family that encouraged him to notice
and respond to injustices. Later in life, his father and mother
would always continue to support King's choices, though they were
forced at times to witness the tragic consequences of those choices,
including their son's premature death.
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