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was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.

„I Just Want to Do God's Will ..."“

These are words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s last sermon, spoken the day before his death. They succinctly sum up this influential leader, his message, and his life’s mission of serving God.

Martin Luther King was born Michael Luther King in Atlanta, Georgia, January 15, 1929, and died April 4, 1968, by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. He was killed because of his stand against racism, war, poverty, and injustice for African-Americans and all races.

At about six years of age he received the name “Martin” from his father—Martin Sr.—who named his son after the Christian reformer, Martin Luther. What an appropriate name because, like Martin Luther, King was destined to radically change the world he lived in.

Martin came from a decidedly Christian background. His father and his grandfather were both Baptist ministers. Martin L. King, Sr. was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Jr. grew up listening to his father preach and his grandmother sing and play the piano.

After graduating from high school, King enrolled in Morehouse college in Atlanta in 1944. He received his BA in 1948, attended Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and received his doctorate from Boston University in 1955. While in college he met and married Coretta Scott, who became his life partner and mother of their four children. After graduate school he and Coretta moved back to the south where his Christian heritage and personal calling began to manifest itself publicly.

King moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he accepted the pastorate of the now famous Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was here that Martin began to make his mark on the civil rights movement in America.

When masses of people began to meet and pray about the arrest of Rosa Parks, the leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and chose Dr. King as their president. Out of these daily prayer meetings King began to preach his message of love and non-violence which he developed directly from the teachings of Jesus Christ.

His greatest oratorical moment came on August 28, 1963, when 250,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

"I have a dream," he began, "that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. "I have a dream 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."

Dr. King practiced what he preached as it related to non-violence. Even though he was stabbed, beaten, put in prison, house-bombed, cursed at and called names—he never retaliated with violence. He was even accused of not being a Christian,

but King thoroughly believed in Jesus for salvation for all mankind, and that is the message which he preached:

—“Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior…. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God.”

Dr. King had a personal relationship with God.

In his famous speech in Memphis that fateful April 3 1968, King summed up his mission to serve his Lord. He said:

“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land." Like anybody, I would like to live a long life... But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”

These prohetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.

Dr. Robert C. Smith