Lonnie King, Leader Of The Atlanta Student Movement, Dies

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Georgia native and civil rights icon Lonnie King Jr. died Tuesday at the age of 82.

Georgia native and civil rights icon Lonnie King Jr. died Tuesday at the age of 82.

King attended Morehouse and was the leader of the Atlanta Student Movement, in which he and others protested against segregated lunch counters.Georgia native and civil rights icon Lonnie King Jr. died Tuesday at the age of 82. He spoke to GPB's "On Second Thought" in 2015.

King spoke on GPB's "On Second Thought" in 2015 about his fight for equality.

"We really believed that the South would change," he said. "All you had to do was change the law and at some point they would begin to do the right thing. We were wrong. The last 50 years, we have to a great extent been driving our car toward freedom on cruise control."

Atlanta City Council members said King left a mark on the city as an activist and founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and leader of the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights. His work inspired the narrative of Atlanta being the "City Too Busy to Hate," council member Michael Julian Bond said, calling King "one of the greatest, yet most woefully unsung Civil Rights giants of his generation."

Council member Andrea L. Boone said King was a personal friend to her family.

"It was my father, Rev. Joseph E. Boone, who allowed Lonnie, Julian Bond and other socially conscious students from the Atlanta University Center to gather at Rush Memorial Congregational Church to plan their protests against segregated downtown lunch counters and department stores when the colleges they attended refused to do so," she said.