King's friends told me that he thought Martin Luther King's - was really exceptional in that he did not seem to be bruised by racism in quite the same way that so many of his peers were.

INSKEEP: What did it mean that Martin Luther King Jr., unlike his father, was able to grow up in relative prosperity in a prosperous part of Black Atlanta?ĮIG: One of Dr. His father and mother are stuck in poverty, unable to escape the white landowner in Stockbridge, Ga., and Martin Luther King Sr., at age 12, walks barefoot out of Stockbridge toward Atlanta to make himself a new life and begins teaching himself to read and write, setting the groundwork to become a preacher, to become an activist and to raise one of the greatest activists in American history. It was part of the father's self-invention after growing up as a sharecropper's son. INSKEEP: Jonathan Eig spends a lot of time on Martin Luther King Jr's youth in his biography 'King: A Life.' We learned that King's father grew up with a different name, Michael King, and adopted the name that his son later made famous. And I was able to see many injustices leveled upon my people. MARTIN LUTHER KING SR: I was born in the midst of segregation at its height. It's an oral history of his father, Martin Luther King Sr. The biographer, Jonathan Eig, found a recording of a voice with a similar cadence, one that King grew up hearing. INSKEEP: We know that cadence, the drawn-out words precisely pronounced, the pauses between each phrase. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history. When he gave the famous 'I Have A Dream' speech in Washington in 1963, he was in his early 30s, though his voice suggested the gravity of long experience. King became a nationally known civil rights leader in his mid-20s.

But in that life, one thing is easy to overlook - how young he was. The life of Martin Luther King is one of the most famous in American history.

Mahatma