HISTORY: 8 Surprising Things You Didn't Know About Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Although King is one of U.S. history's most widely chronicled individuals, there are aspects of his life that are less well-known than the pivotal speeches, the campaigns against Jim Crow city halls from Montgomery in 1955 to Memphis in 1968, and the dalliances that for some, tainted his personal life. King was as complex a figure as exists in our social narrative. He was a man conflicted by his commitment to a movement into which he was drafted against his better judgement and by the overwhelming demands to fulfill the role of human rights spokesperson. He was a husband and father who belonged to a people and a revolution, and the nation's most prominent advocate of nonviolence at a time when violence burned on urban streets, college campuses and in Southeast Asia.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/8-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-dr-martin-luther-king-jr