1. There’s close to 1,000 streets in the world named after Martin Luther King Jr.


2. The Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum.


3. Martin Luther King Jr Day was not recognized as a paid national holiday by all 50 states until 2000.


4. The speech is known as “I Have a Dream” but those words were never in the original draft, they were ad libbed on the day.


5. King’s autopsy revealed that although he was only thirty-nine years old, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old man, perhaps a result of the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights movement. He himself had verbally predicted he would not live past the age of 40.


6. His father was born “Michael King” and Martin Luther King Jr. was originally called “Michael King Jr”. After a family trip to Germany his father, a pastor and missionary, changed both of their names to “Martin Luther” after the German Protestant Reformer.


7. Entering Moorehouse College at the age of 15, he was accepted as part of an early admittance program that was aimed to boost enrollment during the war.


8. He was a Trekkie. And a pretty big one at that. In fact, he was so into Star Trek that he managed to convince Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, to stay on the show beyond the first season.


9. In 1964, at the age of 35, King won the Nobel Peace Prize. To this day he is still the youngest male to ever receive it.


10. There are two places outside of the United States that celebrate MLK day: Toronto, Canada and Hiroshima, Japan.


(Information sourced from various websites. Inquire within an email for more info.)