Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India. Employing non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world. Son... of a senior government official, Gandhi was born and raised in a Hindu Bania community in coastal Gujarat, and trained in law in London. Gandhi became famous by fighting for the civil rights of Muslim and Hindu Indians in South Africa, using the new techniques of non-violent civil disobedience that he developed. Returning to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants to protest excessive land-taxes. A lifelong opponent of "communalism" he reached out widely to all religious groups. He became a leader of Muslims protesting the declining status of the Caliphate.
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Bayard Rustin was an American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, pacifism and non-violence, and gay rights. In the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation , Rustin practiced nonviolence. He was a leading activist of the early 1947–1955 civil-rights movement, helping to... initiate a 1947 Freedom Ride to challenge with civil disobedience racial segregation on interstate busing. He recognized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen King's leadership; Rustin promoted the philosophy of nonviolence and the practices of nonviolent resistance, which he had observed while working with Gandhi's movement in India. Rustin became a leading strategist of the civil rights movement from 1955–1968. He was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was headed by A. Philip Randolph, the leading African-American labor-union president and socialist.
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Jesus , also referred to as Jesus Christ or simply Christ, is the central figure of Christianity, and is also regarded as an important prophet of God in Islam. Most Christian denominations venerate him as God the Son incarnated and believe that he rose from the dead after being crucified. The... principal sources of information regarding Jesus are the Bible's four canonical gospels, which most biblical scholars find useful for reconstructing Jesus' life and teachings. Scholars have correlated the New Testament accounts with non-Christian historical records to arrive at an estimated chronology of Jesus' life. Most modern historians agree that Jesus existed and was a Jewish teacher from Galilee in Roman Judaea, who was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.
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Abraham Lincoln /ˈeɪbrəhæm ˈlɪŋkən/ was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis – the... American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, a Whig Party, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1840s, but he failed in two attempts to be elected to the United States Senate in the 1850s. After opposing the expansion of slavery in the United States in his campaign debates and speeches, Lincoln secured the Republican Party nomination and was elected president in 1860. Before Lincoln could take office in March of 1861, seven southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederacy.
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George MacPherson Docherty was a Scottish-born American Presbyterian minister and principal initiator of the addition of the words "under God" to... the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States. Docherty was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1911. After graduation from Glasgow University and a three-year pastorate at Aberdeen's North Kirk, he set sail from Southampton to the United States in 1950. Docherty succeeded Peter Marshall as the pastor of the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. Abraham Lincoln routinely attended church there while president. It was customary for later presidents to attend New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on "Lincoln Sunday," the Sunday nearest Lincoln’s birthday, and sit in the pew that had been rented by Lincoln. When President Dwight Eisenhower attended on Lincoln Sunday, February 7, 1954, Docherty preached a sermon calling for the addition of "under God" to the Pledge.
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