Martin Luther King, Jr. has been credited as the leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. During his lifetime, he had many titles: husband, leader, preacher and family man, but there may still be some things you don’t know about Martin Luther King, Jr.

1. His name was originally Michael, not Martin.

His father was also Michael King, which is why Martin Luther King Jr. was originally named Michael King Jr. However, after a trip to Germany in 1931, Michael King Sr. changed his own name in homage to historic German theologian Martin Luther. Michael King Jr. was two years old at the time and King Sr. made the decision to change his son’s name to Martin Luther as well.

2. At the age of 12, he may have tried to commit suicide.

It was May of 1941 when his grandmother passed away after a heart attack. At the time, King Jr. was off disobeying his parents by going to watch a parade when they told him not to. When he came home and learned his grandmother had died, he went upstairs and jumped from the second story window of his house.

3. King Jr. skipped two grades in high school – ninth and eleventh.

He entered Morehouse College at the young age of 15 in 1944. By 19, he received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and joined Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., the first black fraternity.

4. King wasn’t the only one to die at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

After he was killed, one of the hotel workers, Lorraine Bailey (who was also the wife of the motel owner and who it was named after), upon seeing King get shot, had a heart attack and later died. This was partially why there was such a delay in getting an ambulance, as Lorraine was also the switchboard operator. When Reverend Samuel Kyles attempted to call an ambulance using the phone in the motel room, nobody was at the switchboard to make the connection.

5. On the day King Jr. was killed, he was out on the balcony smoking.

While you’ll be hard pressed to find a picture of him smoking, he smoked regularly. He hid this, partially due to the stigma within the church at the time, but also because he didn’t want his kids to take up smoking. According to Rev. Kyles, after King Jr. was shot but before the ambulance took him away, Kyles removed the pack of cigarettes from King’s pocket and got rid of the cigarette butt to hide the fact that King Jr. was smoking at the time he was shot.

6. King Jr. convinced Nichelle Nichols who played “Uhura” on Star Trek, to continue on with the role after the first season.

Nichols said King Jr. told her not to leave the show because she was not only playing a black person as a main character on TV, but she was also playing a character that didn’t conform to the stereotypical black person of the day; rather, Uhura was portrayed as an intelligent member of the crew and an equal to those around her.

This seems to have had the intended effect. Whoopi Goldberg once stated when she first saw the character of Uhura on TV, she said “Momma! There’s a black lady on TV, and she ain’t no maid!” It was partially because of this that Goldberg became a huge Star Trek fan and later pushed so hard to get a character on Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the disbelief of the producers that she’d actually want to be on the show.

7. There are only two other people in American history that have a national holiday in their honor: George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

As such, Martin Luther King Jr. is the only native born United States citizen to have a national holiday in his honor. (While Washington was born in Virginia, the United States did not technically exist yet.)

(Source: TodayIFoundOut)