Martin Luther King Jr.

Lived

1929–1968

Era

Twentieth century and after

Where

Atlanta and Montgomery

Tradition

Baptist

The civil rights movement, argued from a pulpit

A Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama, who at twenty-six was chosen to lead the bus boycott, and for the next twelve years led the American civil rights movement until he was assassinated in Memphis at thirty-nine, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers.

Why it matters

The case he made was theological before it was political, and he made it as a preacher: that segregation was sin, that an unjust law is no law, and that the movement would meet force with a refusal to return it. The Letter from Birmingham Jail is addressed to white clergy who had called his campaign untimely, and it is as hard on the moderate who prefers order to justice as on the outright opponent. He turned in his last years to poverty and to opposing the Vietnam war, which cost him much of his support.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.