Martin Luther King Drive station opened on April 15, 2000 along with the rest of the West Side Avenue branch as part of the original operating segment.

Service in the area began a block west at Bergen Avenue in a cut through Bergen Hill for the Newark and New York Branch, a branch that ran from Broad Street station in Newark to the Communipaw station in Jersey City, where it met with the Central Railroad of New Jersey mainline, on July 23, 1869.

[4] Service to Lafayette Street ended abruptly on February 3, 1946, when a steamship crashed into a bridge over the Hackensack River, taking out two spans.

In early 2019, it was announced that the West Side Avenue, Martin Luther King Drive, and Garfield Avenue stations on the West Side Branch would close for nine months starting in June 2019 for repairs to a sewer line running along the right-of-way.

[13] It was later named in honor of the slain civil right leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who had twice spoken in the city.