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What is Martin Luther King Jr.'s real name?

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Lia Ruecker

Lvl 10
4y ago

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His name was Michael Luther King Jr. at first then he changed it to Martin

To this day, questions remain over the names of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and

his father: what names they were given by their parents, what names appeared on

their birth records, and when (if ever) they changed their names are subjects of some

murkiness. According to an account Martin Luther King, Sr. gave to a New York Post

reporter in 1957, he had always intended his son's name to be Martin Luther, and the

appearance of the name 'Michael' in his son's birth records was a mistake due to

confusion over his own name:

I had been known as Michael Luther King or "Mike" up until I was 22 ... when

one day my father, James Albert King, told me: 'You aren't named Mike or

Michael either. Your name is Martin Luther King. Your mother just called you

Mike for short.' I was elated to know that I had really been named for the

great leader of the Protestant Reformation, but there was no way of

knowing if papa had made a mistake after all. Neither of my parents could

read or write and they kept no record of Negro births in our backwoods

county ... I gladly accepted Martin Luther King as my real name and when

M.L. was born, I proudly named him Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was not

until 1934, when I was seeking my first passport ... that I found out that

Dr. Johnson, who delivered M.L., had listed him in the city records as

Michael Luther King, Jr., because he thought that was my real name.

No records documenting a formal name change for either King yet have been

uncovered, so in a strict legal sense one might say that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s name

officially remained "Michael" until his death. However, what constitutes a "legal name"

can be quite fluid. My own mother, born in the same era as

Martin Luther King, Jr., was raised by people other than her

birth parents from an early age and did not know her real

first and middle names. (Indeed, she did not learn which

names were actually listed on her birth record until I

obtained a copy of the document for her when she was in

her mid-50s.) Nonetheless, the first and middle names she

adopted in place of the unknown real ones were listed on

every government-issued record pertaining to her created

during her adult lifetime (e.g., marriage license, driver's

license, Social Security card, children's birth certificates) and

were therefore her "legal" names every bit as much (if not

moreso) than the ones that appeared on her birth record.

In any case, whether Martin Luther King, Sr. gave a true account of the issue in 1957

(i.e., that both he and his son were officially named 'Martin' by their fathers but called

'Michael' through confusion or mistake) or simply decided in his adulthood that he

preferred he and his son be known as 'Martin' instead of 'Michael,' the name change was

not (as suggested above) an affectation on the part of Martin Luther King, Jr.; it was

something decided for him by his father while he was still very young.

*Snopes

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Education, Medical, Writing, Sales, Bilingual. These are some examples for telecommute jobs. http://www.freelancemom.com/great-telecommuting-jobs.htm

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12y ago

Michael King,Jr

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