Martin Luther King, Junior, is born

Martin Luther King, Junior, an African-American clergyman who orchestrated social change through non-violent methods was born on 15 January 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. Martin Luther shaped and articulated the message of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King led blacks in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, an action stimulated by the arrest of Rosa Parks. Parks boarded a city bus and refused to give up her seat for a white person. The bus driver called police and Parks was arrested and fined. As the  South African Government, led by the National Party under D.F. Malan was introducing Apartheid in 1948, King was graduating from Morehouse College, Atlanta. It emerged from the elections of 1948 won by National Party, that apartheid, or the policy of racial segregation, is deemed to have become official policy in South Africa. In America, racial segregation on city buses was ruled unlawful in 1956. The boycott ended in success.