A Celebration for Freedom © Deborah Jeter Jan 2, 1998 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on Jan. 15, 1929. This site is a great place to go for succinct information about this great man. To give you an idea of how helpful this site could be in your MLK studies which involve freedom songs and civil rights music, here are some excerpts from one of the pages at this site, titled In-depth Chronology: * At thirteen, King, Jr., becomes the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for the Atlanta Journal. * King, Jr., is ordained and appointed assistant pastor at Ebenezer at the age of 19. * In 1951, (King was born in 1929), King is accepted as a student in the Post-Graduate School of the Faculty of Divinity at Edinburgh University, Scotland. * Also in May of 1951, King, Jr., graduates from Crozer with a bachelor of divinity degree, delivering the valedictory address at commencement. He receives both the Pearl Plafker Memorial Award as the graduating student who, "in the judgment of the faculty, has bee n the outstanding member of his class during his course in the seminary," and the J. Lewis Crozer Fellowship, which provides $1,200 toward graduate school. Even though areas of this site are under-construction, there is still enough great information to warrant a visit, if you are interested in learning more about Martin Luther King, Jr. For a quick way to search for specifics, try the MLK Bibliography provided by Stanford University. Another site regarding MLK, Jr., is located at SeattleTimes. Here you are given the opportunity to make comments in a discussion area. There are lessons for the classroom available as well. On this page, there is a link to the archives of conversations that have taken place in other classrooms. One of the discussion topics is, ". . . where they will not be judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character." This section could give us some ideas as to how we might start a dialogue in our own classrooms. I have found that the civil rights songs that my classes sing in January and February have more meaning if they have a better idea of why the songs were written, what purpose they played in the history of the United States, and what impact they were on the entire world. In regards to music, here is a list of sites and resources that you could find most helpful when keeping the freedom message alive from generation to generation through music.