Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister who led the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 until he was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, at thirty nine. He preached nonviolent resistance against segregation, and in 1964 he became the youngest person to that date to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before all that he was a doctoral student at Boston University, and in 1965 he spoke to a crowd that filled Boston Common. In Washington, find the step on the Lincoln Memorial where he stood on August 28, 1963, to deliver the I Have a Dream speech; it is marked in the stone. His own memorial on the Tidal Basin carries the address 1964 Independence Avenue, for the Civil Rights Act of that year, and its granite figure steps out of a mountain of despair as a stone of hope.