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Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on 15 January 1929 in his maternal grandparents' large Victorian house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the second of three children, and was first named Michael, after his father. Both changed their names to Martin when the boy was still young. King's paternal grandfather, James Albert King, had been a sharecropper near the small town of Stockbridge, Georgia, outside Atlanta. Like most sharecroppers, he had worked hard and …

…by the long bus ride back to Atlanta: the bus was segregated, and the black people had to stand so that the white people could sit. Thus King grew up in a family that encouraged him to notice and respond to injustices. Later in life, his father and mother would always continue to support King's choices, though they were forced at times to witness the tragic consequences of those choices, including their son's premature death.