"

It is never easy for one to accept the role of symbolism without going through constant moments of self-examination," the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr told the BBC's Face to Face programme in 1961. The BBC's interview took place between two milestones in the civil rights movement. It was recorded six years after King led the 381-day boycott of Montgomery's buses following Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, and two years before he made his I Have a Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington. John Freeman's interview explores the early experiences that helped to form King's political and ethical outlook. Martin Luther King Jr is known as the face of the mid-20th Century fight for civil rights, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the only non-president whose birthday is a US holiday. More like this: - Nina Simone on how fury fuelled her songs - Toni Morrison on why 'writing for black people is tough' - The day Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man Born in a deeply segregated Atlanta, Georgia, on 15 January 1929, he was initially named Michael after his father Rev Michael King, who was senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. However, on a trip to Germany, King Sr was inspired to change his name and his son's name to Martin, after the leader of the Protestant Reformation. Growing up in the church and experiencing a "relatively strict" upbringing, King Jr enrolled in Morehouse College at the age of 15 and joined his family's long line of pastors, earning a degree in divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. Later, at Boston University, King earned a doctorate in systematic theology. "I had no idea that I would be catapulted into a position of leadership and the civil rights struggle," says King. MLK's legacy plays a principal role in the messy project of the United States. Even his most famous speech, I Have a Dream, is quintessentially American: inspired by the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. "My work is simply an attempt to say to America that you have a marvellous ideal, and that you should live up to it," says Martin Luther King in the BBC interview. "This problem can be solved in the United States if enough people give themselves to it; if they devote their lives to breaking down all of the barriers that separate men from men on the basis of race or colour," he says. Yet that was still a long way off. "The vast majority [of Black Americans] still confront problems of economic insecurity and social isolation," King told the BBC in 1961.