Happy Birthday Dr. King

The UAA Honors College Forty-Ninth State Fellows wish to call the attention of the University community to the anniversary of the birth of civil rights era American leader Martin Luther King, Jr., born Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. Having earned a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University in 1955, King, as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, led a year-long boycott of public transportation in Montgomery after the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man. The boycott helped to generate a U.S. Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in public transport.

In 1963 he delivered a dramatic speech at a Washington, D.C. rally on the theme "I Have a Dream," establishing him as one of the finest orators in American history. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.