Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant and sensitive boy aware of the suffering and inequality around him. He was taught to read by his mother before the age of five. King was so advanced that he skipped his first year of high school, and went directly to college after his junior year, at the age of 15.

King attended Morehouse College in Atlanta where he graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology. At Morehouse College, King was exposed to Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience. It helped convince King that individuals had, not only a right, but, also, an obligation to oppose unjust laws. It wasn’t his intention to follow his father’s footsteps, but at the age of 19 King was ordained and became co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. There he used the family pulpit to begin preaching social change.

He then attended his first integrated school, Crozer Theological Seminary near Chester, Pennsylvania. There, he earned a Bachelor of Divinity Degree, and was elected president in his third year by his majority white classmates. Crozer was known for it’s liberal theological leanings and nondenominational approach to education. King was introduced to many inspirational leaders and philosophies, including the practice of pacifism. King was not convinced by the “do-nothing approach” of pacifism and believed that social change required action. When he learned about Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent activism, which won the oppressed people of India their independence from the tyrannical British Empire in 1947, he found the method of social reform he had been seeking.
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In 1951, King graduated as Valedictorian from Crozer and went on to Boston University, where he earned his PhD in Theology in 1955. There, he met his future wife, Coretta Scott, who would be his greatest supporter, and the mother of his four activist children.