President Reagan signed the holiday into law, and it was first observed three years later. At first, some states resisted observing the holiday as such, giving it alternative names or combining it with other holidays. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.
King never stopped spreading his message of non-violent protest against racial injustice. But there were also people who wanted him silenced. King was attacked more than once during public appearances, as well as arrested during demonstrations. An assassin's bullet fatally wounded King as he stood on a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968.
Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery city bus. That night, E.D. Nixon, head of the local chapter of NAACP, met with King and other local civil rights leaders, who elected King to lead a citywide bus boycott. In his first rallying speech as the group’s president, he displayed a natural gift for inspirational rhetoric that would continue to grow stronger in the future.
Despite the strong role model of his minister father, King. began questioning religion during his early teenage years. However, when he was a junior in high school, he took a Bible class which influenced him to renew his religious beliefs, and began to envision life as a minister. After graduating from Morehouse College in 1948 and attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, King was working on his doctoral studies at Boston University when he met Coretta Scott. They married in 1953, and by 1955, when King earned his Ph.D, he was already pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was just 25 years old.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, the middle child of parents who both had deep roots in rural Georgia. His father, who became a successful minister, changed his name to Martin Luther King to honor the German Protestant religious leader Martin Luther.
