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Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. He was born into a religious family and his father was a preacher at a Baptist church. Black people in the southern part of the United States did not have equal rights when Dr King was growing up. They were often poorer and less well educated than white people. Black students in Atlanta were forced to attend separate schools, and live in separate areas of the city, under a system known as segregation. Martin enjoyed learning, and he passed through school very quickly. He entered Morehouse College at age fifteen and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. Morehouse was one of the few colleges in Atlanta where Black students could study at the time. Martin discovered he had a gift for public speaking while he was at university, and he decided to become a preacher. He moved north to study in Boston when he was 22, and it was there that he met and married his wife, Coretta. He graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, then studied at Boston University. He received his doctorate in systematic theology in 1955. In 1954, Martin and Coretta moved to Montgomery, Alabama, after he was offered a job as a Baptist Minister. Dr King became a civil rights activist early on in his career, and led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott began after Rosa Parks, a black woman who lived in Montgomery, was arrested for sitting in the white part of a city bus. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted more than a year, and ended when the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial separation was illegal in the Montgomery bus system. The ruling gave black people a new feeling of pride and unity. They saw that peaceful protest could be used as a tool to win their legal rights. Dr King became well known throughout the world and he was often asked to speak about his ideas on non-violence. The civil rights movement spread quickly in the southern part of the United States. An organization called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed to guide it, and Martin Luther King became its president. King was one of many leaders in the wider civil rights movement. Activists used marches, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent protest to challenge segregation. Participants often faced threats and violence. In 1963, Dr King organized a March to Washington D.C, where he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech, which expressed his ideas and hopes for the future. He was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1964, but he did not live to see the final results of his life's work. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 while supporting a strike by the city's sanitation workers. A boycott depends on more than a speech or a single public figure. People must decide to participate, support one another, and continue when the effort becomes difficult. Remembering that shared work helps explain why King's biography belongs within the history of a wider movement, rather than standing apart from it.