Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister from Atlanta with a Boston doctorate who led the Montgomery bus boycott at twenty-six and, for the next twelve years, the movement that ended legal segregation in the American South through nonviolent direct action learned from Gandhi and Thoreau. Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in the margins of a newspaper in April 1963 to white clergymen who had called his campaign untimely, is the classic defence of civil disobedience and the most read American political document of the century. He won the Nobel Peace Prize at thirty-five and was assassinated in Memphis at thirty-nine.