Remembering the Man who had a Dream

by Timeless Courage

The third Monday in January of every year is a national holiday in the United States in honour of the renowned and celebrated advocate of non-violent social change and foremost civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King whose birthday is on the 15th of Janaury. Dr. King would have been 80 last year had he been alive. Though King may be dead, his legacy has lived on. The symbolic leader of American blacks, youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, keynote speaker at the March on Washington and prime mover of the Montgomery bus boycott was thrown into the spotlight at the young age of twenty-six when as a member of the executive committee of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), he accepted the leadership of the first great Negro non-violent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States. The NAACP was the leading organisation of its kind then in the U.S. Though any number of historic moments can be used to identify Dr. King, his policy of non-violent protest borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi of India was the dominant force in the civil rights movement during its decade of greatest achievement from 1957 to 1968. Martin Luther King was born at noon on Tuesday, January 15, 1929 at the family home in Atlanta Georgia to the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and Alberta King (nee Williams), a former schoolteacher. He was one of three children (being the first son and the second child) and was initially christened Michael and later renamed Martin when he was about 6 years old. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia including the Yonge Street Elementary School, the David T. Howard Elementary School, the Atlanta University Laboratory School and the Booker T. Washington High School. Due to his high scores at the college entrance examinations and having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, Dr. King advanced to Morehouse College (a distinguished historically Black institution...

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