As one of the most important figures in American history, Martin Luther King Jr.'s work for civil rights is widely taught in schools.
Less well known is King's personal history. What was he like when he was young, growing up in Atlanta? How did he grow to become a great leader?
As it turns out, Connecticut -- Hartford and Simsbury, in particular -- played an important part in making him the great man he was.
King grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a very good student, a hard worker, and religious. He was a serious boy, as would be expected of a child who was the son and grandson of preachers.
His family taught him to be loving, and optimistic.
King wrote in his autobiography: "I have a marvelous mother and father. ... It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where lovely relationships were ever present."
That didn't mean he had it easy, though. King wrote:
"The first twenty-five years of my life were very comfortable years. If I had a problem I could always call Daddy. Things were solved. Life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package. This is not to say that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth; far from it. I always had a desire to work, and I would spend my summers working."
It was in Connecticut that he had a most important summer. In 1944, when King was 15, he traveled to Simsbury to work on a tobacco farm owned by Cullman Brothers. He went with a group of young men who students at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
This changed his life. In Atlanta, black people did not mix with white people. It was different in Connecticut.
In letters home, he told his family about attending church along with white people, and being surprised he could eat in a nice Hartford restaurant.
He wrote in a letter to his mother in June 1944: "We went to church Sunday in Simsbury and we were the only Negroes there. Negroes and whites go to the same church." This was very different from the South.
In another letter to his mother that month, he wrote: "Yesterday we didn't work so we went to Hartford. We really had a nice time there. I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford."
King had been thinking he wanted to be a doctor or lawyer instead of a preacher like his father and grandfather. The summer in Simsbury changed that: He "felt an inescapable urge to serve society," according to documents from the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University.
"After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation," King wrote in his autobiography.
Traveling on the train home to Atlanta, he had to switch to a segregated train in Washington, D.C. It was terrible for him.
"I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect," he wrote.
That changed history.