History of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Newspaper articles about Martin Luther King, Jr. tell the story of an African-American minister whose strong hope for social change never swerved his belief in nonviolence. During the American civil rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's, King encouraged nonviolent methods to protest segregation such as boycotts of city buses that gave preferential treatment to whites, sit-ins at lunch counters that refused to serve African Americans and mass rallies to draw attention to the civil rights cause.

During one of the largest rallies at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech on August 28, 1963, 100 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that declared all slaves free in Confederate states. King told a crowd of 200,000 people in his speech, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made headlines across the country as one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement. NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest newspaper database available online, has provided a free archive on the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the public to view thousands of original newspaper articles. The archive includes stories from days of the Montgomery bus boycott, the I Have A Dream speech, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968, and thousands of other headlines on the civil rights leader. Click on the timeline above to view newspapers in chronological order or begin searching newspaper articles with your own key words.