Martin Luther King Jr.
The Mountaintop
30 x 24 inches • oil on wood panel • artist Steve Simon
Biography
About the Painting
Selected Quote
Overview
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a Baptist minister who coupled his Christian beliefs with Gandhi’s theories on nonviolent civil disobedience to achieve social justice on many fronts.
A powerful orator, King became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. He worked to eliminate discrimination, voter suppression, and poverty. Imprisoned 29 times, his nonviolent efforts were instrumental in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. At the age of 35, he was the youngest man to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was assassinated at the age of 39.
Promised Land
Martin Luther King Jr. Biography
Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. As a child, King sang in the choir and by high school, his oratorical skill had already become apparent. He attended Morehouse College, receiving a BA in sociology in 1948, and then enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. At Crozer, he was elected president of his mostly white senior class before receiving a Bachelor of Divinity in 1951. King further studied systematic theology at Boston University. In Boston, King met an intelligent and talented singer named Coretta Scott. The couple married in 1953, two years before King received his Ph.D.
On October 31, 1954, King was installed as the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In the following year, Rosa Parks was arrested for defying racial segregation laws by refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery city bus. In response to the event, King participated in the planning and execution of the Montgomery bus boycott that eventually ended with a judicial decision ending racial segregation on Montgomery public buses. The events catapulted King into the spotlight as the best-known, national civil rights figure.
In 1957, King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group, led by King until his assassination, used nonviolent means to organize the energy of black churches in the battle for civil rights reform. In 1963, King and the SCLC organized nonviolent protests against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Shocking images of officials directing fire hoses on protesters played on televisions across the country. Birmingham officials would eventually grant many of the movement’s desegregation demands.
On August 28, 1963, King delivered his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech. With an estimated attendance of 250,000 protesters, it was to that point in history the largest such gathering in Washington, D.C. Ten months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, forbidding discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Later that year King became the youngest man to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
On August 28, 1963, King delivered his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech. With an estimated attendance of 250,000 protesters, it was to that point in history the largest such gathering in Washington, D.C.
I Have a Dream graphic art by Steve Simon
In 1965, King led marches in Alabama in protest of voter suppression. The efforts culminated with President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
In the following year, King helped lead the Chicago Freedom Movement that demanded a broad range of reforms including fair housing, education, and employment in that city. The movement is largely credited with bringing about the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
In his last years, King became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War while also launching the Poor People’s Campaign. King’s last speech was delivered to a group of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee who were striking for higher pay and better treatment. He was assassinated the following day, April 4, 1968, outside his hotel room. Dr. King was 39 years old.
Over the course of his remarkable service in the name of social justice, King wrote five books and spoke more than 2,500 times. Along the way, he survived a stabbing, a home bombing, and other assaults. He was arrested more than two dozen times, suffered harassment from the FBI, and endured false accusations of communist sympathizing. King promoted and demonstrated Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent civil resistance in a way few thought possible. Ironically and tragically, in the wake of King’s murder, anger boiled over as riots broke out across the country.
Two funeral services were held for Dr. King. The first was a private ceremony at the Ebenezer Baptist Church where King and his father had served as pastors. From the church, King’s casket was loaded on a rustic farm wagon and pulled by two mules along a three-mile journey. Approximately 100,000 mourners joined the procession before it arrived at Morehouse College, King’s alma mater. There a public service was offered before Dr. King’s body was interred in South View Cemetery. Upon his gravestone were carved the words “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last.” King’s body was later exhumed and reinterred at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
About the Painting
Martin Luther King delivered a speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968. At the end of the speech, which has since become known as the Mountaintop speech, King offered hope to the immediate audience and the broader movement by figuratively painting a picture with classic King oratory. He explained that God had allowed him to see the Promised Land. Then, in words that seemed to foreshadow his own death, King said, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” King was assassinated the next day.
The painting borrows from the composition of Benjamin West’s Moses Shown the Promised Land. In West’s painting, angels direct Moses’ attention to the Land of Canaan, which God said Moses would not enter. In this parallel composition, King is shown the Promised Land by deceased historical figures whose shoulders he stood upon—those who had already helped bend “the arc of the moral universe.”
The angels include, from left to right: William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Mohandas Gandhi.
Martin Luther King Jr. Quote
“And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
