Martin Luther King, Jr., a slideshow!
For the highly exemplary spirit of his work, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He began college at age 15 and subsequently earned several college and university degrees from schools the like of none other than Yale. He always had the spirit of passion about family values and about the values of reaching out. For example, in his youth when he heard that his grandmother died, in a show of intense emotion he jumped out a second story window of his house. Of course he is one of the most highly influential heroes of the still raging cause of fighting racism in all its forms, but also spoke out seriously against Vietnam and in favor of the American economy. He earned the title of Reverend in what is known as the Preaching Tradition, succeeding after his father, who was a Baptist Pastor and missionary. Throughout the US there are over seven-hundred streets that are named for him. During the course of his decades-long activism he travelled 6 million miles and made 2500 speeches. His "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial was attended by an astounding 200,000 people and the Treasury Secretary at that time told him that one of the five-, ten-, or twenty-dollar bills would be altered to display the Lincoln Memorial in memory of King. Once, later in his inspirational career, he was stabbed and underwent critical, life-saving ER surgery. Still, afterward he publicly announced that he bore no ill will toward his attacker. What is definitely most remarkable about this man was his choice of Nonviolent Protest as his central tool. Following in the footsteps of Mahatma Ghandi, King learned early on that such a protester must be specially and intensively trained to receive physical and verbal abuse without a violent response. The use of this tool had a seismic, life-changing effect around the world.