Martin Luther King Jr.’s name when he was born on January 15, 1929, was Michael not Martin.
In 1934, his father, a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, traveled to Germany. Inspired by Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, King Sr. not only changed his own name to Martin Luther, but that of his then five-year-old son. The rest, as they say, is history!