Fifty years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. The now almost universally revered civil rights leader used nonviolent civil disobedience to protest Jim Crow laws against blacks. Everyone knows that. Not everyone knows he protested that way because he was a Christian. What else do you need to know? Here’s a quick guide to his life and work.

King was born on January 15th, 1929, in Atlanta. His father was a pastor and early civil rights leader. King grew up in church, where he sang in the choir. His mother, an accomplished organist and choir leader, took him to churches to sing. He became famous in those churches for singing, “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus.” When he was 13, he expressed doubt about the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. He grew in faith, however.

Extraordinarily bright, he skipped ninth and twelfth grade, and started studying at Morehouse College at the age of fifteen. He studied sociology. While in college, he dated a white woman for six months. He ended the relationship because of racial issues. His friends warned him that it would hurt his future career as a pastor with both blacks and whites, and his mother would not approve. He eventually married Coretta Scott King.

At 19, he graduated, was ordained, and started seminary. In 1954, he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was only 25. He received his Ph.D. degree in systematic theology at Boston University a few months later. His dissertation compared the conceptions of God in two liberal Protestant theologians, Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.

King’s Peaceful Protests

He hadn’t been pastor long when on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus to a white man. The city bus system forced black Americans to sit in the back. King led a boycott of Montgomery buses for 385 days. The police arrested him, but the U.S. District Court ultimately ruled that segregation must end on the buses.

Two years later, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with other civil rights activists. He became its first president. The group worked with black churches to fight segregation. The crusades of Billy Graham inspired the SCLC. Graham advised the group privately. Graham and most Christian leaders at the time opposed public protest, instead of working through the political system. They also opposed using the churches to bring about change.

A preacher, King was fond of quoting Scripture in his speeches. He believed in turning the other cheek, as Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. His faith was based on Jesus’ commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies.

In 1961, police arrested King along with other peaceful demonstrators for leading a march in Albany, Georgia. Authorities put him in jail for three days and released him after Billy Graham paid his bail. A 1963 protest in Birmingham, Alabama, proved successful when the police were caught on video using high-pressure water jets and dogs on children. Police arrested King and put him in jail. There he wrote his famous Letter From Birmingham Jail. 

Police arrested him a total of 29 times throughout his career.

The March on Washington

In 1963, King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Over 200,000 gathered on the Mall. There King gave his most famous speech, I Have a Dream. In that speech, he said: “I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. ‘l’he rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.” He continued:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will he able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Also in 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy directed the FBI to tap King’s phone. President Johnson was concerned that there were communists within the SCLC that would undermine the administration’s civil rights initiatives. Despite wiretapping King for five years, the FBI could find no evidence of communist infiltration.

Because of his leadership of the civil rights movement, King is credited in part with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, he called the award “a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time.” He said:

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. … I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. 

In 1967, he delivered a speech at a New York City church titled Beyond Vietnam. Speaking to a group called Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, he strongly condemned the war. Major newspapers — even the New York Times and the Washington Post  — denounced him and his former supporter President Lyndon Johnson abandoned him.

The Tragic Assassination

In 1968, King went to Memphis to support striking black sanitation workers. They were paid much less than their white peers. There he delivered his I Have Been to the Mountaintop address. The next day, King was shot and killed by James Earl Ray while standing on a hotel balcony. He was only 39.

However, his family does not believe Ray was the murderer. Ray pled guilty, giving up a jury trial. A judge sentenced him to 99 years in prison. In a successful civil suit filed by the King family against restaurant owner Loyd Jowers, a jury found that Jowers as well as ”others, including governmental agencies” had been part of a conspiracy. Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King’s death. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, observed, “The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame.”

Due to the King family’s beliefs about the killers, the government started an investigation in 2000 under U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. The DOJ issued a 150-page report. It found there was no conspiracy and rejected the findings of the jury. Jesse Jackson disagreed, saying in 2004, “I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.”

Americans now celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day near the date of his birthday, on the third Monday of January each year. The Episcopal Church holds a feast remembering King as a martyr on the day of his death each year. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America commemorates King annually on his birthday, January 15.

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