Martin Luther King Jr.

Born Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, he became the face of the civil rights movement beginning with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which he oversaw as a young Black church leader. As first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he led marches for voting rights, desegregation, and labor protections - Birmingham in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 - each met with segregationist crackdown that exposed the machinery of oppression to a watching country. The campaigns produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, even as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI surveilled him, recorded his private life, and sent him an anonymous letter he took as a suicide threat. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, then turned toward poverty and Vietnam. On April 4, 1968, while organizing the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, he was shot dead in Memphis; James Earl Ray was convicted, cities burned, and a federal holiday arrived eighteen years later.