History :: Martin Luther King Jr.

A great deal of Martin Luther King’s character, drive and devotion to the cause of civil rights was formulated in the years he spent living in Chester. It started when he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in 1948, where he began to seriously study the life and work of Mohandas K. Gandhi. "I came to see for the first time," he later wrote, "that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Ghandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in the struggle for freedom." During his tenure, King taught Sunday school and preached at Calvary Baptist Church, before obtaining his Bachelor's degree in divinity in 1951.