USA celebrates Martin Luther King's Day

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is celebrated on the third Monday in January, although Dr. King was actually born on the 15th of January 1929, 84 years ago.

The number of years since the very first national celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 21, 1986.

Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929. He was an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the history of American progressivism.

On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago.

In the years leading up to his death, he expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People's Campaign.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many US cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing him, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting, and the jury of 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King.

King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor.

In 1968 Martin Luthe King got a death injury and died in Sen-Jhozeph hospital.