by Christina Pomoni

Created on: September 17, 2008

The man, who dared to dream, the leader of African Americans, who shot the nightmare of racism from a close range, the vicar from Georgia, who removed the dreary white hood of America, was born in a middle class family His father and grandfather were Baptizers preachers, while his middle mane Luther - was added when Martin was five years old as an homage to Luther of religious Reform.

From the early years of his life, he was affected by the darkness of white prejudice. In some of his later speeches, King talked extensively for the curtains that terrorized his childhood, those curtains that were used in the dining rooms of trains to separate Whites from Blacks. "I was very young when I first experienced the feeling of being behind the curtain. I felt as if a curtain had fallen on my entire life".

At the age of fifteen, King began his studies at the College Morehouse of Atlanta, in a special program for talented students. In the last year of his studies he abandoned his interest for the medicine and the law and selected, under the intense psychological pressure of his father, the career of clergyman. The next three years, he studied at the Theological Seminar of Croser in Chester of Pennsylvania from where he graduated in 1951 with the diploma of Theology.

His already intrigued thought was greatly affected by the philosophy of "political disobedience" and the "no violence of Mahatma Ghandi as well as the theories of modern Protestant theologians. After Croser, he joined the University of Boston where met his later spouse Coretta Scott. In Boston, he got a solid base for his own theological and moral principles on which he built his doctoral thesis "Comparative study of ideas about God in the thought of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Vima.

He was almost one year vicar of the church of Baptizers in the Avenue Dexter in Montgomery of Alabama, when few followers of the movement for the political rights of the city inaugurated the fight against the racial discriminations in the public buses. The reason was the arrest of Rosa Park, who had denied granting her seat in the bus to a White passenger as the legislation of racial discriminations required. Fervent representatives of the local Black population hurried to establish the "Union for the Progress of Montgomery" putting as leader Martin Luther King.

During his first speech as chairman of the Union he demonstrated his distinguished oratory ability: "We do not have other choice than to protest. For many years, we have exposed

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