Martin Luther King Jr. word search

Pick a list. Three are by age. The fourth is about helping out, for a class planning something for the day of service. Change or add any word, up to 30, then choose a grid and print. The answer key comes on page two.

Sheet number is the seed, so the same words, settings and number always give the same grid. That lets a whole class share one puzzle. Press New grid for a different one.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta on 15 January 1929. He became a Baptist minister and a leader of the civil rights movement, and he held to nonviolence throughout. In 1953 he married Coretta Scott.

Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, and King oversaw the bus boycott that followed. On 28 August 1963 he gave the I Have a Dream speech to more than 250,000 people at the March on Washington, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The picture at the top of this page is the view from those steps at dawn, across the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument.

In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. The next year he helped organise two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches, part of the fight for voting rights. He was killed in Memphis on 4 April 1968.

Congressman John Conyers brought the first bill for a King holiday in 1968. It took fifteen years. Stevie Wonder released his song Happy Birthday to push the campaign along, and President Reagan signed the law on 2 November 1983.

The holiday was first kept on 20 January 1986, on the third Monday of January, close to King's birthday. By 2000 every state observed it. A 1994 law made it a national day of service too, asking people to spend it helping their communities, and AmeriCorps has coordinated that work since.