page 8 Martin Luther King Jr. day was celebrated on Monday, January 16, 2006. Mont Alto Students decided to take this day and serve in dedication to Dr. King. They attended the YMCA in Wayneborough, PA since there were not any academic classes in remembrance of Dr, King. They found themselves sharing the same cause of service with other elementary level schoolchildren. According to Activities Coordinator Julie DeMoss they had “so much fun playing bingo, basketball, and coloring sheets that represented what Dr. Martin Luther King did.” Mont alto Sophomore Bub Stokes “felt more than happy to wake up so early and share the great vision of Dr. King with the kids” and “looks forward to coordinating another activity with the kids through the Volunteer Club.” Stokes felt “like an older brother who can never lose to anyone in Basketball.” Mont Alto Black Student Union President Treasure Kitchen thought, “the day could not go any better.” and “the day of service was good for an awareness of what Dr. King was really all about.” Kitchen states “Dr. King was about public service and making our surroundings a better place for us to enjoy.” Black Student Union Treasurer Indera Nero felt “good and happy about the outcome of being with the kids” and “she was surprised on how educated the kids were about the day.” The day ended by a ceremony dedicated to Dr. King in the Wiestling Student Center. There was a program consisted of many reflections of Dr. King. These reflections followed by the Black National Anthem sang by James Walton “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and reflections in poetry brought forward by Mont Alto Freshman Antonia Houston. This was continued by a PowerPoint slide show of the many things that Dr. King has done. Black Student Union Vice President Lenesha Brown “looks forward to future days of service. institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had been graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization. of its kind in the According to the Nobel Prize.org Dr. Martin Luther King was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955 In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family. In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time 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, “1 Have a Dream.” 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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