Martin Luther King, Jr. Bust

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born into a middle-class family on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. The second of four siblings, he was the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher. Growing up, King attended the city’s segregated public schools. An extremely bright student, he graduated high school at the age of fifteen. King matriculated at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, where he studied medicine and law. While at Morehouse, he came under the mentorship of the college’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, a theologian and racial justice advocate. Inspired by Mays, King decided to follow in the family tradition by entering the ministry. After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, he enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in divinity in 1951. King then attended Boston University to complete his graduate studies. While attending the university, he joined Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and married Coretta Scott, a young woman from Alabama enrolled at the city’s New England Conservatory of Music. The marriage ultimately produced four children. 

After completing his required coursework at Boston University, King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1954. The following year, the organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott selected him as their leader and official spokesman. The successful protest transformed King, then only in his late twenties, into a national figure and a leader of the civil rights movement. In 1957, he and other African American ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization that he led until his death. An advocate of non-violent protest influenced by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, King organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held in August 1963. At the landmark event, he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of between 200,000 to 300,000 people. The following year, King received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1964, he led a march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery, which helped influence the passage of the Voting Rights Act the following year. 

In the late 1960s, with Jim Crow dismantled in the South, federal protections for African American suffrage in place, and the rise of more militant Black leaders, King turned his attention to other issues affecting African Americans, including economic inequality, housing discrimination, workers’ rights, and the Vietnam War. In 1965, he and local civil rights activists began the Chicago Freedom Movement, which influenced the passage of the Fair Housing Act three years later. To be closer to the campaign, King and his family moved into an apartment in the city’s West Side in January 1966. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while in Memphis to lend his support to striking sanitation workers, he was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law establishing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday. 

Over three decades after King’s death, the St. Sabina Outreach Ministry and the Seventeenth Ward Democratic organization, in cooperation with the Chicago Park District, raised $20,000 for the creation of a bust of the civil rights leader and one-time resident of the city. Designed by internationally renowned sculptor and painter Tina Allen, the bronze sculpture rests on a Corten steel base. As rust naturally develops on the iron alloy, it reveals words associated with King carved into the surrounding pavement. Installed in 2004, the bust resides outside the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park and Family Recreation Center. 

"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bust." Chicago Park District. City of Chicago. Web. 1 May 2021 <https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-bust>.

"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bust." Chicago Public Art: One of the Most Comprehensive Guides to Outdoor Public Art in the City of Chicago. Web. 1 May 2021 <http://chicagopublicart.blogspot.com/2013/09/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-bust.html>.

History.com Editors. "Martin Luther King, Jr." History. A&E Television Networks. 1 April 2021. Web. 1 May 2021 <https://www.history.com/topics/Black-history/martin-luther-king-jr>.

"King, Dr. Martin Luther: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bust." Chicago Park District. City of Chicago. 24 July 2015. Web. 1 May 2021 <https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/media/king-dr-martin-luther-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-bust>.

"Martin Luther King Jr. - Biography." NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2021. Web. 1 May 2021 <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/biographical/>.