Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from Morehouse College at age 19 with a degree in sociology. He received a PhD from Boston University and became a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott from 1955-1956 and wrote his influential book "Stride Toward Freedom". He continued his civil rights work throughout the 1960s, delivering his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike.