Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was a Baptist minister who became the moral voice of the American civil-rights movement, leading the Montgomery bus boycott, writing the Letter from Birmingham Jail, delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. His sermons and speeches are extensively documented, which makes his words checkable — and worth checking, since one widely shared line credited to him (“every man must do two things alone”) actually belongs to Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German reformer whose name he shared.