Today Friday 4 April 2008 marks the 40 anniversary of the death of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King was gunned down by James Earl Ray on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee while preparing to lead a march for sanitation workers protesting against low wages and poor working conditions.

He successfully turned protests into crusades, which made local conflicts into moral issues worldwide.

His insistence of non-violent leadership and tactics succeeded in successfully breaking the segregation laws of the south, and resulted in the attainment of racial and economic justice for blacks.

Despite his desire for non-violence his death resulted in several people losing their lives, several thousand people were injured, large amounts of businesses being set ablaze and lootings and shootings.

Many remember Dr for his civil rights heroics, a Baptist minister whose courage, keen intellect and superb oratory skills inspired a nation, and in many ways, the world.

He is easily remembered for his infamous ‘I have a Dream’ speech which he gave in 1963 during the March on Washington.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?"

Considered one of the saddest days in history SN joins together with black Americans as well as persons throughout the world in mourning this exceptional man who contributed to the civil rights movement.

About Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr (courtesy nobelprize.org)

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin.

His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor.

Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated.

After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951.

With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955.

In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments.

Two sons and two daughters were born into the family. In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation.

He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate.

The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals.

During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement.

The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles.

In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution.

He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream."

He conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times.

He was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

(King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.)