50 years ago, many places in the United States had laws called Jim Crow laws that were unfair to black Americans. Some of those laws made it hard for them to vote in elections, or get good jobs, or even eat in the same restaurants as white people. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his life working to change those laws and help black Americans get the same civil rights as white Americans.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929. He was the son of a Baptist minister, and he was an excellent student. In college, he learned about a man named Mahatma Gandhi who lived in the country of India. In India, Gandhi had helped change unfair laws by teaching people to protest without violence. King thought he could change unfair laws in the United States the same way.

In 1954, King became the minister of a church in Montgomery, Alabama. In Montgomery, when people would ride the bus, black people had to sit in back and let white people sit in front. One of the first things King did was to organize a protest against the bus company. He began to organize other non-violent protests, and soon he was a leader in the civil rights movement.

For many years, Martin Luther King went around the South and other parts of the United States giving speeches about civil rights and leading protests against unfair laws. In 1963, he led a march in Washington D.C. with over 200,000 people. It was here that he gave his famous "I have a dream" speech in which he said that people should not be judged by the color of their skin.

In 1964, Martin Luther King was with President Lyndon Johnson when the President signed the Civil Rights Act, a new law which threw out all the old, unfair laws. That same year, King won the Nobel Peace Prize, a very important honor, for all his hard work in peacefully changing the unfair laws.