How are you celebrating Martin Luther King’s Birthday?

Here is a great idea if you are looking for something fun to do with the kids on MLK day in Portland. Portland, Oregon’s favorite birthday place is hosting 2 Open play sessions with free birthday cake on Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King’s birthday!

Play sessions are scheduled as follows:

Monday Jan 18th: MLK DAY OPEN PLAY
8:30a-9:30a (under 5yrs)
10a-11:15a (all ages)
12p-1:15p (all ages)
FREE BIRTHDAY CAKE ALL SESSIONS!

Come on down and do something fun in celebration of one of America’s great heroes!

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15th 1929 to the name of Michael Luther King, Jr. At some point later in life he had his name changed to Martin. His family had a long history of being pastors at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, first his grandfather served from 1914 to 1931. After which his father continued as the pastor. Martin Luther King acted as co-pastor at this same church as well from 1960 until the day of his assassination. MLK grew up going to segregated public schools in Georgia, and graduated from high school at on 15yrs of age. MLK also received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948 at Morehouse College, similar to both his father and grandfather had graduated. Morehouse was a very well known negro university. He then studied Theology for three years at Crozer Theological Seminary. At Crozer he earned a B.D. and was was elected president of the school, by his predominately white peers. He then enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University and finally completed residence for the doctorate in 1953- on a fellowship grant award. In 1955 he received his degree. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young woman of great achievements both in the artistic and intellectual worlds. He married Coretta and fathered two sons and two daughters.

Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. He was by this time a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In December, 1955, Martin Luther King accepted the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, a bus boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days after which the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses. During the days of the bus boycott, many things happened. King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but after all the difficulty he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

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