Today is Martin Luther King's Birthday

Today is Martin Luther King's birthday. In his memory, a few quick bits and bites:

• Martin was a brilliant student who skipped both ninth and twelfth grades in high school, and went on to attend Morehouse College at the age of 15.
  
  
• After graduating with a sociology degree from Morehouse, Martin went on to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. From there he went on to Boston University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1955.
  
  
• In 1953, at the age of 24, King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
  
  
• Just two years later, in 1955, Rosa Parks, a secretary with the Montgomery NAACP, was arrested for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted more than year. It was duing this time that King's home was firebombed, and that he was first arrested.
  
  
• King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 in order to harness the organizing skills of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in support of civil rights.
  
  
• King visited with Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1959, and this visit deepened his committment to nonviolence as a way of securing civil rights in the U.S.
  
  
• In 1963, Dr. King led the March on Washington --a march of more than 250,000 people, and the first great public demonstration of the "power of the people." President John F. Kennedy opposed the March, because he thought it would spur a backlash against civil rights legislation. It did not.
  
  
• On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. President Johnson gave the pen that signed the law into effect to Martin.
  
  
• In 1964, Martin Luther King became the youngest person to ever be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
  
  
• On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.