Martin Luther King Jr.
Morehouse College

During King's junior year in high school, Morehouse College —an all-male historically black college that King's father and maternal grandfather had attended —began accepting high school juniors who passed the entrance examination. As World War II was underway many black college students had been enlisted, so the university aimed to increase their enrolment by allowing juniors to apply. In 1944, aged 15, King passed the examination and was enrolled at the university that autumn.

In the summer before King started at Morehouse, he boarded a train with his friend—Emmett "Weasel" Proctor—and a group of other Morehouse College students to work in Simsbury, Connecticut, at the tobacco farm of Cullman Brothers Tobacco. This was King's first trip into the integrated north. In a June 1944 letter to his father King wrote about the differences that struck him: "On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to." The farm had partnered with Morehouse College to allot their wages towards the university's tuition, housing, and fees. On weekdays King and the other students worked in the fields, picking tobacco from 7:00am to at least 5:00pm, enduring temperatures above 100 °F, to earn roughly USD$4 per day. On Friday evenings, the students visited downtown Simsbury to get milkshakes and watch movies, and on Saturdays they would travel to Hartford, Connecticut, to see theatre performances, shop and eat in restaurants. On Sundays they attended church services in Hartford, at a church filled with white congregants. King wrote to his parents about the lack of segregation, relaying how he was amazed they could go to "one of the finest restaurants in Hartford" and that "Negroes and whites go to the same church".

He played freshman football there. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, the 18-year-old King chose to enter the ministry. He would later credit the college's president, Baptist minister Benjamin Mays, with being his "spiritual mentor". King had concluded that the church offered the most assuring way to answer "an inner urge to serve humanity", and he made peace with the Baptist Church, as he believed he would be a "rational" minister with sermons that were "a respectful force for ideas, even social protest." King graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948, aged nineteen.
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