ABSTRACT
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in 1929 to a well-respected family which lived on Sweet Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. From the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, until the Memphis sanitation workers strike thirteen years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the principal advocate of nonviolence as both a method of protest and a way of life. In 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black clergymen formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to spread and coordinate the strategy of nonviolent civil rights protest across the South. Until the emergence of the Black Power slogan, King held together an obviously fragmenting civil rights coalition through his prestige and force of personality. In this respect, he served as the vital center of the movement, standing between the conservatism of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Urban League, and the radicalism of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Christian pacifist organization (CORE).
