Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who became the central leader of the American civil rights movement and a global symbol of nonviolent resistance, is the most historically significant person born on January 15. Full Name: Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr., later renamed by his father); Profession: Baptist minister, civil rights leader, social activist, orator, author, Nobel Peace Prize–winning campaigner for racial justice and nonviolent protest; Nationality: American; Born: January 15, 1929; Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia, USA; Generation: Greatest Generation (born between the Great Depression and World War II); Chinese Zodiac: Earth Dragon (year 1928–1929 lunar span; widely recorded as Dragon in popular references for his birth year); Zodiac Sign: Capricorn; Age in 2026: 97 (deceased); Marital Status: Married (to Coretta Scott King from 1953 until his death in 1968); Children: Four (Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice Albertine King); Description: Martin Luther King Jr. grew up in a middle-class Black family anchored in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father and grandfather were pastors, and where he internalized both the Christian gospel and a sense of dignity and resistance in the face of Jim Crow segregation. After studying sociology at Morehouse College and theology at Crozer Theological Seminary and earning a PhD in systematic theology from Boston University, he fused Christian ethics with Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, emerging as a young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, just as the 1955–56 bus boycott launched the modern civil rights movement. As cofounder and leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King orchestrated campaigns across the South—Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma—enduring repeated arrests, bombings, and threats while using boycotts, marches, and civil disobedience to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, delivered before hundreds of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial, crystallized a vision of racial equality and moral democracy that helped galvanize support for landmark federal legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle for civil rights, King increasingly turned his attention in the late 1960s to economic injustice and the Vietnam War, launching the Poor People’s Campaign and arguing that racism, poverty, and militarism were intertwined evils eroding American and global democracy. His outspoken positions brought intensified FBI surveillance under COINTELPRO and growing hostility from critics who saw his antiwar stance as unpatriotic, yet he continued organizing sanitation workers and the urban poor, insisting that civil rights required not only formal equality but real material opportunity and human dignity. King’s assassination in Memphis at age 39 turned him into a martyr for civil rights and sparked uprisings in cities across the United States, and in the decades since, his birthday has become a U.S. federal holiday while his sermons, speeches, and strategic model of nonviolent mass protest continue to inform movements for justice around the world. Cause of Death: Assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, by a rifle shot fired by James Earl Ray; he died about an hour later at St. Joseph’s Hospital from hemodynamic collapse due to massive hemorrhagic shock caused by the gunshot wound.