Martin Luther King, Jr. was born at noon on Tuesday, January 15, 1929, at his home in Atlanta, Georgia. He was first named Michael Luther King Jr., and later changed his name to Martin, after his father. He was the first son and second child born to the reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King, a schoolteacher.
             In September 1935, Martin began his schooling at the all-black Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta.
             Growing up as an African American in Georgia, Martin experienced and suffered much discrimination throughout his boyhood. This discrimination against black people was cruel and demoralizing. Martin Luther King Jr. told once of an experience he had riding a bus with his schoolteacher from Macon to Atlanta, "the driver started cursing us out and calling us black sons of bitches. I decided not to move at all, but my teacher pointed out that we must obey the law. So we got up and stood in the aisle the whole 90 miles to Atlanta. It was a night I'll never forget. I don't think I have ever been so deeply angry in my life."1
             There were many discriminatory laws in the South. They had certain restaurants that blacks were allowed to eat in, separate water fountains and separate bathrooms. Just about everything you can think of was segregated -- black from white One of his first experiences was with the curtains that were used on the dining cars of trains to separate the whites from the blacks. This incident struck Martin pretty hard. He said, "I felt just as if a curtain had come down across my whole life. The insult of it I will never forget."2
             Martin was an extremely bright student and skipped right through his high school years and on June 1944 entered Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College at age 15. His father encouraged him to study ministry, while he had his heart set on medicine or law. Martin was embarrassed of his own religion. He didn't unders...