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Reverend '''Martin Luther King, Jr'''., Ph.D. (1929-1968) was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, who became an advocate against racial discrimination and was later a critic of the war in [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]]. He became by far trhe most important black leader of the 1960s, and since his assassination in 1968, he is the single most important exemplar of liberalism in recent U.S. history. King founded the [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]]. On Dec. 31, 1955, he led the nonviolent [[boycott]] of city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, after [[Rosa Parks]] was arrested for not moving to the back of the bus.<ref>http://www.thekingcenter.org/mlk/chronology.html</ref>
Rev. King wrote his most famous writing, “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” (1963), while imprisoned for demonstrating against segregated eating facilities.
His last major public speech became known as "I've Been to the Mountaintop" <ref>http://www.afscme.org/about/1549.cfm</ref>
Although King is generally embraced by the American cultural establishment today, he and the authorities did not always have such a cordial relationship. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The [[FBI]], under the direction of [[J. Edgar Hoover]], kept King under surveillance from 1961 until his death in 1968. The Bureau tapped his phones and bugged his hotel rooms. The FBI did not end its surveillance of King's wife, [[Coretta Scott King]], until many years after her husband's death. King was a well-known [[Conservative]] <ref>http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.DYK-Why%20MLK%20was%20a%20Republican</ref> who opposed the [[death tax]] and rights for [[homosexual]]s.
== See also ==