The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remembered

More than 37 years since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed while preparing to lead a local march in Memphis, Tenn., people nationwide are still witnessing the effects of his message of hope, peace, and unity, and his dream for a color-blind world.

Today, thousands are gathering to honor King and celebrate the efforts of a man who strongly promoted non-violence and racial equality in a nation divided against itself on the issue. Throughout the country, events have been scheduled to honor the memory of the civil rights leader, whose 77th birthday would have been today and will be celebrated as a national holiday Monday.

But while King is the best known for his role in the American Civil Rights Movement, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was first and foremost a pastor.

“Religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life,” King wrote in an essay in November 1950.

"The pastor role was central to everything, virtually everything, that Dr. King achieved," said Lewis Baldwin, professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, who specializes in the history of the black churches in the United States.

In many ways, King was simply carrying on the family business, Baldwin told The Seattle Times.

"His father was a pastor. His grandfather had been a pastor. His great-grandfather had been a pastor, and several of his uncles were preachers and pastors.”

King was 25 and finishing his doctoral dissertation at Boston University when he was appointed to his first pastorate — at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.

It was 1954 and King arrived after a period of internal tensions in the congregation. Church leaders were looking for somebody to help restore morale.

"He didn't come to Montgomery to lead a boycott," Dexter Avenue associate pastor the Rev. Mary Jo Smiley told The Seattle Times. "He came to be a pastor."

But even as the young King was establishing his pastorate, racial tensions were rising in Montgomery — tensions that would launch him into a national leadership role.

About a year after King’s arrival, Montgomery seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a bus to a white passenger. The event prompted a group of 16 to 18 people to gather at the Mt. Zion AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies. The group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, suggested the name "Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA). The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Although King was a relative newcomer to Montgomery and a young and mostly unknown minister, he was elected as their president.

From then on, King began speaking out and leading peaceful protests. And from the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he helped ignite the Montgomery bus boycott.

"It was the African-American church that nurtured him and gave him the sense that God was a God of justice, God was a God of mercy. God was a God of reckoning," the Rev. Michael Thurman, who pastors the current-day Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.

“We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands,” wrote King in a letter written from Birmingham Jail in April 1963.

Following the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign, which ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on intrastate buses, King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) – a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct nonviolent protests in the service of civil rights reform.

Thurman told The Seattle Times that King's position in the congregation enabled him to become deeply involved with the boycott and the wider civil-rights struggle.

But as King was drawn deeper into the national civil-rights effort, he became concerned that he was neglecting his church. King later resigned in 1960 in order to devote more time to the national civil-rights struggle but became an associate pastor at his father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to maintain his pastoral role.

"Not only was he a pastor at the local congregational level, preaching to people, responding to the needs of people, but he was also a pastor to the nation, because he was very interested in the soul, determined to redeem the soul of the nation," Baldwin said.

For more than a decade, King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

King continued his efforts in the American Civil Rights Movement up until he was assassinated on Apr. 4, 1968, while preparing to lead a local march in Memphis, Tenn., in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time. His death prompted a declaration by President Lyndon Johnson four days later for a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader.

Martin Luther King Day, however, was the result of a large-scale campaign headed by a number of activists. It was observed for the first time on Jan. 20, 1986, two years after President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating the federal holiday to honor King on the third Monday of January each year.