Martin Luther King Jr.'s Selective Service System Registration Record
The Selective Service System was formed in 1917 to register eligible men ages 18 to 25 for possible induction in the U.S. military. The Selective Service System records held at the National Archives at St. Louis consist of registration cards and classification ledgers. The image below is the Selective Service System registration card of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1948. King was a Christian minister, activist, and one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.
Selective Service System registration cards, like the one above, have been digitized in collaboration with Ancestry.com and are available online through the Ancestry website. Selective Service System Records are in Record Group 147: Records of the Selective Service System. Often when beginning research, an individual’s Selective Service record is a good starting point.
We encourage researchers to visit us onsite to explore these records and learn more about the archival collections held in the National Archives at St. Louis.