We made this timeline when we did our Martin Luther King Jr. Webquest:
January 15, 1929 - Martin Luther King Jr. is born.
September, 1935 - Martin Luther King Jr. goes to school at the all-black Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta.
About 1936 - Two white playmates were told not to play with Martin, and his mother had to explain segregation to him.
June 1944 - Martin Luther King Jr. enters Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was only 16 years old!
June 18, 1953 - Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott are married.
November 17, 1955 - Yolanda Denise King, the King's first child, is born.
December 1, 1955 - Mrs. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
December 5, 1955 - Martin is elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and leads a year long boycott of the Montgomery buses.
January 26, 1956 - Martin Luther King is arrested for the first time, for a traffic violation.
January 1957 - The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is founded. Dr. King is chosen president.
February 1959 - Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, visit India. They study Mahatma Gandi's methods of nonviolent protest.
January 1960 - The King family moves to Atlanta, where Martin becomes co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father, Martin Luther King, Sr.
October 19, 1960 - Martin is jailed after being arrested at a sit-in at a lunch counter in Atlanta.
January 30, 1961 - Dexter Scott King is born.
May 1961 - "Freedom Riders" leave Washington, DC by Greyhound bus. The bus is burned by opponents of desegregation, and the riders are beaten upon arrival in Birmingham, Alabama.
December 1961 - Albany, Georgia protest against segregation and discrimination.
September 1962 - Black student James Meredith attempts to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi.
March 28, 1963 - Bernice Albertine King is born.
April 12, 1963 - Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested and jailed (for the thirteenth time) during a march in Birmingham, Alabama.
November 22, 1963 - President Kennedy is assassinated.
August 1964 - Three young civil rights workers are found murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
December 1964 - Martin Luther King Jr. receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
March 28, 1968 - Martin Luther King leads a march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.
April 3, 1963 - Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop."
April 4, 1963 - Martin is shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
April 10, 1970 - California passes legistlation making King's birthday a school holiday, the first in the nation to do so.
January 20, 1986 - First observance of Martin's birthday as a legal holiday nationwide.