// The Chapters
From Sweet Auburn to the Mountaintop
Six acts. Thirty-nine years. One dream that changed a nation.
1929 - 1955 · The Formation
The Preacher's Son
Born into the Black church. Educated at Morehouse at 15. He had every tool he would need. The world wasn't ready.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia — a street so prosperous it was called "Sweet Auburn." His father, Martin Luther King Sr., was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was a schoolteacher. Young Martin was gifted — he skipped ninth and twelfth grades, entering Morehouse College at 15. He was ordained at 18, earned a divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and completed his PhD at Boston University in 1955. At Crozer, he discovered the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. At Boston University, he met Coretta Scott, a singer and activist from Alabama. They married in 1953. He accepted the pastorship of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama — a quiet posting for a brilliant young minister. Within a year, nothing about his life would be quiet again.
Sweet Auburn
January 15, 1929 · Atlanta, Georgia
Born in the parsonage of Ebenezer Baptist Church. His grandfather founded the church. His father pastors it. The boy will grow up hearing sermons about justice, dignity, and the prophetic tradition. The pulpit will become his weapon.
Morehouse at Fifteen
September 1944 · Morehouse College, Atlanta
A 15-year-old enters Morehouse College. Benjamin Mays, the college president, becomes his intellectual father — teaching him that the church must engage with the world's injustice, not retreat from it. King decides to enter the ministry. The philosopher-preacher is born.
Discovering Gandhi
1949 · Crozer Theological Seminary, Pennsylvania
King attends a lecture on Gandhi's campaigns in India. He reads everything he can find. The synthesis happens: the Christian gospel of love plus Gandhian nonviolent resistance equals a strategy that can break American apartheid. The weapon is assembled. He just needs the battlefield.
1955 - 1960 · The Awakening
Montgomery and the Boycott
A woman refused to give up her seat. A city refused to ride the bus. A preacher refused to back down. 381 days later, Jim Crow blinked.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery. The local NAACP chose the 26-year-old King to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott because he was new to town and had no enemies. The boycott lasted 381 days. King's house was bombed on January 30, 1956 — Coretta and baby Yolanda were inside. An angry crowd gathered with weapons. King stepped onto his porch and said: "We must meet hate with love." They went home. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus segregation laws unconstitutional. King was on the front page of every newspaper in America. He was 27.
The Holt Street Address
December 5, 1955 · Holt Street Baptist Church, Montgomery
5,000 people pack the church and overflow into the street. King has twenty minutes to prepare a speech that will define the movement. "There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression." The crowd erupts. The boycott begins. He is 26 years old.
5,000 in attendance
20 min to prepare
The Bombing
January 30, 1956 · 309 S. Jackson St., Montgomery
A bomb explodes on King's front porch. Coretta and ten-week-old Yolanda are inside. They survive. An armed crowd gathers, ready for violence. King emerges onto his shattered porch and says: "If you have weapons, take them home. We must love our white brothers." The crowd disperses. Nonviolence is tested for the first time, and it holds.
Victory in Montgomery
November 13, 1956 · Supreme Court Decision
After 381 days, the Supreme Court rules in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation is unconstitutional. King rides the first integrated bus on December 21. He sits in the front. A reporter asks him how it feels. "It's a great ride," he says. The movement has its model. Now it scales.
381 days of boycott
42,000 Black riders lost
Off the Record
During the boycott, King experienced a crisis of faith. Late one night in January 1956, after a threatening phone call, he sat at his kitchen table ready to quit. He prayed aloud: "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. But I'm losing my courage." He later said he heard a voice — an "inner voice" — telling him to stand up for righteousness. He called this his "kitchen table experience." It was the spiritual foundation of everything that followed.
1960 - 1963 · The Crucible
Birmingham and the Dream
He filled the jails with children. He shamed a nation on television. He stood on the Lincoln Memorial and dreamed out loud for 250,000 people.
The sit-in movement and Freedom Rides spread nonviolent resistance across the South. In April 1963, King launched Project C ("Confrontation") in Birmingham, Alabama — the most segregated city in America. When adults were arrested, the SCLC sent children. On May 3, 1963, Bull Connor ordered fire hoses and police dogs on children as young as six. The photographs shocked the world. On August 28, 1963, King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people at the March on Washington and delivered the most famous speech of the twentieth century. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Letter from Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963 · Birmingham City Jail
Arrested for violating an injunction against protests, King writes a 7,000-word letter on newspaper margins and toilet paper in his cell. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." It is the intellectual manifesto of the civil rights movement, written in solitary confinement.
The Children's Crusade
May 2-3, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama
Over 1,000 children march in Birmingham. Bull Connor orders fire hoses at 100 PSI and police dogs on children as young as six. The images — a German shepherd lunging at a fifteen-year-old boy, a girl flattened by water pressure — appear on front pages worldwide. Public opinion shifts overnight. JFK calls it "shameful."
1,000+ children arrested
100 PSI hoses
"I Have a Dream"
August 28, 1963 · Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.
250,000 people. The Lincoln Memorial. Mahalia Jackson shouts "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" He sets aside his prepared text and speaks from his soul. 17 minutes. The most important speech since Gettysburg. "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last." The nation hears it. The world hears it.
1964 - 1965 · The Triumph
Selma to the Voting Rights Act
He won the Nobel Prize at 35. He marched from Selma to Montgomery. He got the vote. Then America started to turn.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places. King won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35 — the youngest recipient at the time. But voting rights remained the unfinished business. In Selma, Alabama, only 2% of eligible Black voters were registered. On March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — state troopers attacked 600 marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with tear gas and clubs. ABC interrupted its broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremberg" to show the footage. The irony was not lost on anyone. King led 25,000 marchers from Selma to Montgomery on March 25. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.
Bloody Sunday
March 7, 1965 · Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma
600 marchers cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama state troopers charge on horseback with billy clubs and tear gas. John Lewis's skull is fractured. Amelia Boynton is beaten unconscious. ABC broadcasts the footage to 48 million viewers. The nation recoils. Selma breaks the dam.
600 marchers
48M TV viewers
The March to Montgomery
March 21-25, 1965 · Selma to Montgomery, Alabama
25,000 marchers walk 54 miles from Selma to the Alabama state capitol. King leads them up Dexter Avenue — the same street where his first church stands. He addresses the crowd from the capitol steps: "How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
The Voting Rights Act
August 6, 1965 · The White House
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act with King standing behind him. Within two years, Black voter registration in Mississippi rises from 6.7% to 59.8%. The legal architecture of Jim Crow is demolished. The promise of the 15th Amendment, ratified 95 years earlier, is finally enforced.
1966 - 1968 · The Widening
Beyond Civil Rights
He turned against the war. He turned toward poverty. He lost allies. He kept marching.
King moved north. In Chicago in 1966, he confronted housing segregation and was hit by a rock thrown by a white mob. "I have never seen such hate," he said — "not in Mississippi, not in Alabama." On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, he publicly opposed the Vietnam War, calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." It cost him. The White House turned against him. Moderate allies abandoned him. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which had been surveilling him for years, intensified its campaign of harassment. King launched the Poor People's Campaign, seeking economic justice for all races. He was evolving past civil rights into a broader critique of American society. The establishment that had tolerated his work on segregation was not prepared for his challenge to economic power.
Riverside Church
April 4, 1967 · New York City
Exactly one year before his death, King breaks his silence on Vietnam. "A time comes when silence is betrayal." He calls the war a moral catastrophe. The New York Times accuses him of damaging the civil rights cause. LBJ cuts him off. King does not recant. His conscience will not permit silence.
Chicago and the North
Summer 1966 · Chicago, Illinois
King leads marches through all-white neighborhoods in Chicago demanding open housing. He is struck by a rock in Marquette Park. "I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago." Northern racism, he discovers, is different in style but identical in substance.
Off the Record
The FBI's COINTELPRO program under J. Edgar Hoover attempted to destroy King. They wiretapped his phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and sent him an anonymous letter suggesting he commit suicide. The letter, now declassified, contained recordings of his extramarital affairs and said: "You are done. There is but one way out for you." King called it "the most dangerous Negro in America" — Hoover's own words about the man who preached love.
April 1968 · The Mountaintop
Memphis
"I've been to the mountaintop. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you."
King went to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers — 1,300 Black men who carried signs reading "I AM A MAN." On April 3, 1968, he delivered his final speech at Mason Temple. He was exhausted, ill, and prophetic. "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land." The next evening, at 6:01 PM, standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was killed by a single rifle shot fired by James Earl Ray. He was 39.
"I've Been to the Mountaintop"
April 3, 1968 · Mason Temple, Memphis
A thunderstorm rages outside. King almost didn't come. He's tired. He has a fever. Ralph Abernathy calls and says the crowd needs him. He arrives late and delivers the most haunting speech in American history. He knows. Everyone in the room knows. The next day, at 6:01 PM, a bullet proves them right.
The Lorraine Motel
April 4, 1968 · 6:01 PM · Memphis, Tennessee
Room 306. The balcony. He steps out to greet his friends below. Ben Branch is about to play at dinner — King asks him to play "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." A rifle shot from a boarding house across the street. He falls backward. Ralph Abernathy cradles him. He is pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 PM. He was 39 years old.
The Funeral
April 9, 1968 · Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta
A mule-drawn cart carries his coffin through the streets of Atlanta. 100,000 people walk behind it. At Ebenezer — the church where he was baptized, ordained, and co-pastored with his father — a recording of his own voice delivers the eulogy. He had preached his own funeral sermon weeks earlier: "Tell them I tried to love somebody."