Martin Luther King
A Baptist minister from Atlanta who at twenty-six led the Montgomery bus boycott — for more than a year the city’s black residents walked, and the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses. Then came the marches, the jails, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the 1963 March on Washington with the speech “I Have a Dream”. He took non-violence from Gandhi and held to it when stones were thrown at him and his house was bombed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are the fruit of those years; in 1964 he became the youngest man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In April 1968 he was shot in Memphis, where he had come to support a strike of sanitation workers.
He was born in Atlanta on 15 January 1929 at exactly noon, Central time; the hour is on his birth certificate.