Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are two of the most influential African American civil rights leaders in history. Each of these men used different tactics to attain equality. These men came from very different backgrounds which were influential in the way they went about attaining racial equality. These men were very important during the time when African Americans were being oppressed, and they were able to organize blacks in order to overcome this oppression.

Arguably the most important person to have made a

significant change in the rights of African Americans was Martin Luther King. He possessed great courage and passion about being able to defeat segregation and racism that existed in the United States, and it was his influence to all African Americans to defy segregation and his belief in nonviolence that helped lead to the success of the Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. The city was one of many southern cities suffering from harsh discrimination and, in addition, the Ku Klux Klan had set up one of its headquarters there. But it was his father, Martin Luther King Sr. who played an important r

d waiting tables for money, and he eventually turned to drug dealing and use to in order to deal with his problems. "He then turned to burglary, and, in 1946, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term on burglary charges" (Malcolm X).

By the time the Montgomery Improvement Association chose the 26-year-old Luther King Jr. as its leader, the hours-old bus boycott by the black citizens of Montgomery, Ala., was already an overwhelming success. King would later write that his unanticipated call to leadership "happened so quickly that I did not have time to think it through. It is probable that if I had, I would have declined the nominations. Although press reports at the time focused on his inspiring oratory, King was actually a reluctant leader of a movement initiated by others."

During this time, a man named Reverend William Holmes Borders influenced King. He admired the Reverend Borders, who had built Wheat Street Baptist Church into Atlanta's largest black church and who possessed the academic credentials that King's own father lacked. Although both ministers had struggled from poverty to graduate from Morehouse College, Borders had also obtained a divinity degree from Garrett Theological Seminary and a master's degree from Northwestern before returning to Atlanta, where he taught religion at Morehouse and became an outspoken preacher at Wheat Street. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King and his friends studied "Borders' mannerisms, his organizational style, and above all the high-toned sermons in which he aroused his congregation without merely repeating the homilies of eternal life." This would begin to shape the all to familiar style of King's speeches and his ability to deliver them with power and intensity.1

Martin Luther King was able to achieve the impossible. He was an ambitious man who wanted to make a difference in the lives of every African American. Step by step, he organized demonstrations and wrote speeches to further strengthen his cause. His philosophy of non-violence played a key role in the success of the right to be free, and his ability to convey this message was key. He stands out as someone who made a stand against oppression to become a leader in the fight for civil rights. But as everyone knows, a great leader is made in part by someone who can speak to the masses and inspire them with every word he utters; and this quality shines bright in memories about Dr. Martin Luther King.

Growing up in a middle class area, King was given the opportunity to go through a tremendous amount of schooling. He attended Booker T. Washington High School and later Morehouse College were he studied under a highly influential man in his life named Benjamin Mays. He entered the seminary in 1948 and became interested in religion as it pertained to society. He moved on to Boston College where he took on the idea of "Personalism", i.e. the sanctity of the individual.

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