MLK's Longport and Cape May, NJ Connections

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Longport and Cape May Connections – By William Kelly

Today January 21, 2013 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a national holiday and inauguration day, when Barrack Obama, the first black president is sworn in for a second term using Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bible. In addition, for his invocation, Obama has chosen not a preacher, not a lawyer, but the widow of the assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

Evers was shot by Brian DeBeckwith with a high powered rifle in front of his Mississippi home in 1963, but DeBeckwith was acquitted by an all white jury, and only later convicted decades later because of the tireless efforts of his widow and the courageous  prosecution by an assistant district attorney. If Evers’ assassination was properly prosecuted immediately, it is my belief that President Kennedy would not have been killed the way he was, by a similar sniper in a southern city.

Before he was killed in Memphis King was the victim of an assassination attempt in New York City where he was attacked by a women with a knife when signing copies of his first book. While he was in intensive care in the hospital, the New York Times reported that the knife almost severed his main artery, in which case he would have died if he had sneezed. In Memphis on the stormy night before his own assassination, King gave his last speech in which he recounted recuperating from the knife wound in the hospital and receiving many letters of support from the president, the governor of New York and others, the contents of which he forgot, but he didn’t forget the letter from a 9^th grade white girl from White Plaines, NY high school,  who wrote simply that she was glad he didn’t sneeze.

http://csopassassinations.blogspot.com/2013/01/if-i-had-sneezed-mlks-greatest-speech.html

As Glen Klotz notes in his @ the Beach blog http://athebeach.blogspot.com/, King’s radicalization can be traced back to his time at Crozier College in Philadelphia,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=76kVjRkl450

Indeed, it was while at Crozier on Sunday, June 10, 1950 when King and three friends visited Mary’s Café in Maple Shade, in Camden County, New Jersey, and were refused service by a gun wielding bar owner. They filed charges against him, King’s first known reaction to blatant racism and the moment that he is said to have decided to devote his life to the cause of civil rights, not just the civil rights of blacks but the civil rights of all people. See: http://csopassassinations.blogspot.com/2013/01/mlk-in-south-jersey.html

Klotz, who writes from the Absecon Island (Atlantic City) Downbeach town of Margate, would be interested to know that King’s most well know speech, “I Had a Dream,” was co-authored by Clarence Jones.

Jones, an influential civil rights lawyer and close aide and associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a book “Behind the Dream,” the story of King’s famous March on Washington speech at Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963. Besides preparing the notes for the speech, and ensuring it was copyrighted, Jones stood by King when the speech was delivered, and his book tells the story of how it all came about.

Now a scholar in residence at the MLK Center at Stanford University, Jones has recently done some radio interviews with BBC and National Public Radio in which he recounts some of what is in the book. Most interesting is the background of Clarence Jones himself.Born in Philadelphia, Jones’ parents were live-in domestic servants in an apparently well to do Philadelphia home, so young Jones was sent off to a Catholic boarding school where most of the students were orphans, educated by Irish nuns who Jones credits with teaching him how to write well.

One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their employer in Longport, NJ, the upper crust Downbeach town next to Margate, young Jones went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things that he had never been confronted with before.

When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in Longport.

Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attended Columbia University and after being drafted and given an undesirable discharge for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath, he studied law and became a lawyer. Moving to California, one day in 1960 Martin Luther King visited him at home, and tried to persuade him to assist him in defending against a trumped up tax evasion case, but Jones turned him down because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move back east. After being berated by his wife however, Jones attended the church service where King gave the sermon on the subject of the responsibilities of black professionals to assist other less fortunate blacks, after which Jones joined King’s legal team.

To hear the NPR interview with Clarence Jones, or read the transcript:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132905796/dream-speech-writer-jones-reflects-on-king-jr  Clarence Jones is now in residence at Stanford MLK Center:
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php

Without success, at least so far, I have tried to find out the name and current whereabouts of the young 9^th grade girl from White Planes high school who wrote to King to say she is glad he didn’t sneeze, but I did correspond via email with Clarence Jones, who said that the name of the family whose Longport home his mother worked as a housekeeper was Lippincott, a Quaker family who owned the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall (Now Resorts).

With some effort, I did find a partial transcript of the speech King gave at Cape May, but have yet to learn if there is an existing audiotape or film of the event.

.

In 1958, before he became a national spokesman for civil rights. King visited Cape May, where he gave a speech to a convention of Quaker Friends on the topic of Non-Violence and Racial Justice.  

At a time when blacks were beginning to break segregation laws that called for separate schools, rest rooms and water fountains, and prevented blacks from sitting in the front of the bus or at the lunch counter, King called for non-violence resistance, and not to resort to violence. He called for everyone to love those enemies who espoused hate, and to “fulfill the dreams of our democracy.”

Although the call for non-violence resistance went unheeded with the violent response to the Birmingham bombing, the murders of white civil rights workers and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, King’s Cape May speech is powerful and moving and indicates the synthesis of his thoughts and ideas that were later personified in his later work and more recognized sermons and speeches.

While I have yet to find any news reports of King’s visit to Cape May, to learn where the Convention was held, if he stayed overnight and if so where, and have not found a film or audio tape of the speech, I did find a partial transcript of it in the Friends Journal of July 26, 1958.

It should also be noted that on June 28-July 5, 2008, the annual Gathering of Friends met in Johnstown, Pa to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of MLK’s address Nonviolence and Racial Justice to Friends at Cape May, NJ in 1958.

http://www.friendsjournal.org/2008056/

Non violence and Racial Justice

By MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

It is impossible to look out into the wide arena of American life without noticing a real crisis in race relations. This crisis has been precipitated, on the one hand, by the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the South to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in the public schools.

This resistance has often risen to ominous proportions. Many states have risen up in open defiance. The legislative halls of the South ring loud with such words as "interposition" and "nullification." The Ku Klux Klan is on the march again and that other so-called Respectable White Citizens' Councils.  Both of these organizations have as their basic aim to defeat and stand in the way of the implementation of the Supreme Court's decision on desegregation. They are determined to preserve segregation at any cost. So all of these forces have conjoined to make for massive resistance.

But interestingly enough, the crisis has been precipitated, on the other hand, by radical change in the Negro's evaluation of himself. There would be no crisis in race relations if the Negro continued to think of himself in inferior terms and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. But it is at this very point that the change has come. 

Something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more; with the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, and a great depression, his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban  industrial life. His cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. And even his economic life was rising through the growth of industry and other influences. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves, and the Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of His children and that all men are made in His image. And so he came to see that the important thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the texture and quality of his soul.

Since the struggle for freedom and human dignity will continue, the question is this: How will the struggle for racial justice be waged?  What are the forces that will be at work?

What is the method that will be used?  What will the oppressed peoples of the world do in this struggle to achieve racial justice?

There are several answers to this question, but I would like to deal with only two. One is that the oppressed peoples of the earth can resort to the all-too-prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred.  We all know this method; we're familiar with it. It is something of the inseparable twin of Western materialism. It has even become the hallmark of its Grandeur.

Now I cannot say that violence never wins any victories; it occasionally wins victories.  Nations often receive their independence through the use of violence. But violence only achieves temporary victory; it never can achieve ultimate peace. It creates many more social problems than it solves. And violence ends up defeating itself. Therefore it is my firm conviction that if the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness.  And our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

The other method that is open to oppressed people as they struggle for racial justice is the method of nonviolent resistance, made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India, who used it effectively to free his people from political domination, the economic exploitation, and humiliation inflicted upon them by Britain. There are several things we can say about this method.  First, it is not a method of cowardice, of stagnant passivity; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is resisting as the violent resister.

He resists evil, but he resists it without violence. This method is strongly active. It is true that it is passive in the sense that the nonviolent resister is never physically aggressive toward the opponent, but the mind is always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is wrong.

This method does not seek to defeat and humiliate the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. Occasionally, the nonviolent resister will engage in boycotts and

noncooperation. But noncooperation and boycotts are not ends within themselves; they are merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and to awaken his dozing conscience. The end is redemption; the end is reconciliation. And so the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The method of nonviolence is directed  at the forces of evil rather than at  the individuals caught in the forces of evil. The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil systems rather than individuals who are victimized by the evil systems.

The nonviolent resister accepts suffering without retaliation. He willingly accepts suffering. The nonviolent resister realizes that unearned suffering is redemptive; he is willing to receive violence, but he never goes out as a perpetrator of violence. He comes to see that suffering does something to the sufferer as well as the inflictor of the suffering.

Somehow the Negro must come to the point that he can say to his white brothers who would use violence to prevent integration, "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws.  Do to us what you may, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and spit upon our children, and we will still love you. 

Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and take us out on some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half dead, and we will still love you.  Go all over the nation with your propaganda and make it appear that we are not fit morally or culturally or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you.  But we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom, and we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process, and therefore our victory will be a double victory."

That is another basic thing about nonviolent resistance. The nonviolent resister not only avoids external physical violence, but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him. The oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. We must somehow come to see that this leads us only deeper and deeper into the mire; to return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of hate and evil in the universe.

So somehow people in this universe must have sense enough and morality enough to return love for hate.

Now when I speak of love, I am not talking about some sentimental affectionate emotion.

I'm talking about something much deeper. In the Greek language there are three words for love. The Greek, for instance, talks about Eros, a sort of aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to us as romantic love. Therefore we know about Eros. We have lived with Eros.

And the Greek language talks about philia, which is also a type of love we have experienced. It is an intimate affection between personal friends; it's a reciprocal love.  On this level we love because we are loved; we love people because we like them, we have things in common.  And so we all experience this type of love.

Then the Greek language comes out with another word for love; it calls it agape, creative, understanding, redemptive good will for all men. It is a spontaneous love which seeks nothing in return; it's an overflowing love. Theologians would say that it is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we rise to love on this level, we love men not because we like them, not because their ways appeal to us; we love them because God loves them. We come to the point that we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed the person does. And I believe that this is what Jesus meant when

He said, "Love your enemies."

The nonviolent resister has faith in the future.  He somehow believes that the universe is on the side of justice. So he goes about his way, struggling for man's humanity to man, struggling for justice, for the triumph of love, because of this faith in the future and this assurance that he has cosmic companionship as he struggles.

Call it what you may, whether it is Being Itself, with Paul Tillich, or the Principle of Concretion with Whitehead, or whether it is a Process of Integration with Wieman, or whether it is a sort of impersonal Brahman with Hinduism, or whether it is a personal God with boundless power and infinite love, there is something in this universe that works in every moment to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole. There is a power that seeks to bring low prodigious hilltops of evil and pull down gigantic mountings of injustice, and this is the faith, this is the hope that can keep us going amid the tension and the darkness of any moment of social transition. We come to see that the dark of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. This is the faith and the hope that will keep us going.

The nonviolent resister sees within the universe something at the core and the heartbeat of the moral cosmos that makes for togetherness. There is something in this universe which justifies James Russell Lowell in saying,

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

So down in Montgomery, Alabama, we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.

The problem of race is certainly the chief moral dilemma of our nation. We are faced now with the tremendous responsibility of solving this problem before it is too late. The state of the world today does not permit us the luxury of an anemic democracy, and the clock of destiny is ticking out. We must solve this problem before it is too late. We must go out once more and urge all men of good will to get to work, urge all the agencies of our nation, the federal government, white liberals of the North, white moderates of the South, organized labor, the church and all religious bodies, and the Negro himself.

And all these agencies must come together to work hard now to bring  about  the  fulfillment  of  the  dream  of  our  democracy. Social progress does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes only through persistent work and the tireless efforts of dedicated individuals. Without this persistent work time it becomes the ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation.

I think of the great work that has been done by the Society of Friends. It gives all of us who struggle for justice new hope, and I simply say to you this evening: continue in that struggle, continue with that same determination, and continue with that same faith in the future.

Modern psychology has a word that is used probably more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."

All of us are desirous of living the well-adjusted life. I know I am, and we must be concerned about living a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, as I come to my close, that there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted, and I call upon you to be maladjusted to all of these things. 

I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

I call upon you to be maladjusted to each of these things. It may be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. So let us be maladjusted. As maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the generations, "Let judgment run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free.

As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an  age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, "All men are created equal, [and]...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, [and]... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look at the men of his generation and cry out, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you."

Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. This is what stands ahead. We've made progress, and it is great progress that we must make if we are to fulfill the dreams of our democracy, the dreams of Christianity, the dreams of the great religions of the world.

I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher who didn't have his grammar quite right. But he uttered words with profound meaning. The words were in the form of a prayer: "Lord, we ain't what we want to be, we ain't what we ought to be, we ain't what we gonna' to be, but thank God, we ain't what we was."  And so tonight I say, "We ain't what we ought to be, but thank God we ain't what we was." 

And let us continue, my friends, going on and on toward that great city where all men will live together as brothers in respected dignity and worth of all human personality. This will be a great day, a day, figuratively speaking, when the "morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., is President of the Montgomery, Alabama, Improvement Association. His moving address as given here is somewhat cut. In some of the passages deleted from the first part he spoke of the 50,000 Negro citizens of Montgomery who had ultimately found it "more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation," summarized the history of the Negro in America from 1619 through the nineteenth century, and linked the struggle of the American Negro to attain human dignity with the revolt of oppressed peoples all over the world, particularly in Asia and Africa.

From: FRIENDS JOURNAL July 26, 1958

MLK's Cape May Speech on Non-Violence & Social Justice

FRIENDS JOURNAL July 26, 1958

Non violence and Racial Justice

By MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

IT is impossible to look out into the wide arena of American life without noticing a real crisis in race relations. This crisis has been precipitated, on the one hand, by the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the South to the Supreme Court's decision outlawing segregation in the public schools.

This resistance has often risen to ominous proportions. Many states have risen up in open defiance. The legislative halls of the South ring loud with such words as "interposition" and "nullification." The Ku Klux Klan is on the march again and that other so-called Respectable White Citizens' Councils.  Both of these organizations have as their basic aim to defeat and stand in the way of the implementation of the Supreme Court's decision on desegregation. They are determined to preserve segregation at any cost. So all of these forces have conjoined to make for massive resistance.

But interestingly enough, the crisis has been precipitated, on the other hand, by radical change in the Negro's evaluation of himself. There would be no crisis in race relations if the Negro continued to think of himself in inferior terms and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. But it is at this very point that the change has come. 

Something happened to the Negro. Circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more; with the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, and a great depression, his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban  industrial life. His cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. And even his economic life was rising through the growth of industry and other influences. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves, and the Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of His children and that all men are made in His image. And so he came to see that the important thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the texture and quality of his soul.

Since the struggle for freedom and human dignity will continue, the question is this: How will the struggle for racial justice be waged?  What are the forces that will be at work?

What is the method that will be used?  What will the oppressed peoples of the world do in this struggle to achieve racial justice?

There are several answers to this question, but I would like to deal with only two. One is that the oppressed peoples of the earth can resort to the all-too-prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred.  We all know this method; we're familiar with it. It is something of the inseparable twin of Western materialism. It has even become the hallmark of its Grandeur.

Now I cannot say that violence never wins any victories; it occasionally wins victories.  Nations often receive their independence through the use of violence. But violence only achieves temporary victory; it never can achieve ultimate peace. It creates many more social problems than it solves. And violence ends up defeating itself. Therefore it is my firm conviction that if the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness.  And our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

The other method that is open to oppressed people as they struggle for racial justice is the method of nonviolent resistance, made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi of India, who used it effectively to free his people from political domination, the economic exploitation, and humiliation inflicted upon them by Britain. There are several things we can say about this method.  First, it is not a method of cowardice, of stagnant passivity; it does resist. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is resisting as the violent resister.

He resists evil, but he resists it without violence. This method is strongly active. It is true that it is passive in the sense that the nonviolent resister is never physically aggressive toward the opponent, but the mind is always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is wrong.

This method does not seek to defeat and humiliate the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. Occasionally, the nonviolent resister will engage in boycotts and

noncooperation. But noncooperation and boycotts are not ends within themselves; they are merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and to awaken his dozing conscience. The end is redemption; the end is reconciliation. And so the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The method of nonviolence is directed  at the forces of evil rather than at  the individuals caught in the forces of evil. The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil systems rather than individuals who are victimized by the evil systems.

The nonviolent resister accepts suffering without retaliation. He willingly accepts suffering. The nonviolent resister realizes that unearned suffering is redemptive; he is willing to receive violence, but he never goes out as a perpetrator of violence. He comes to see that suffering does something to the sufferer as well as the inflictor of the suffering.

Somehow the Negro must come to the point that he can say to his white brothers who would use violence to prevent integration, "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws.  Do to us what you may, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and spit upon our children, and we will still love you. 

Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and take us out on some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half dead, and we will still love you.  Go all over the nation with your propaganda and make it appear that we are not fit morally or culturally or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you.  But we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom, and we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process, and therefore our victory will be a double victory."

That is another basic thing about nonviolent resistance. The nonviolent resister not only avoids external physical violence, but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him. The oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. We must somehow come to see that this leads us only deeper and deeper into the mire; to return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of hate and evil in the universe.

So somehow people in this universe must have sense enough and morality enough to return love for hate.

Now when I speak of love, I am not talking about some sentimental affectionate emotion.

I'm talking about something much deeper. In the Greek language there are three words for love. The Greek, for instance, talks about Eros, a sort of aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come to us as romantic love. Therefore we know about Eros. We have lived with Eros.

And the Greek language talks about philia, which is also a type of love we have experienced. It is an intimate affection between personal friends; it's a reciprocal love.  On this level we love because we are loved; we love people because we like them, we have things in common.  And so we all experience this type of love.

Then the Greek language comes out with another word for love; it calls it agape, creative, understanding, redemptive good will for all men. It is a spontaneous love which seeks nothing in return; it's an overflowing love. Theologians would say that it is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we rise to love on this level, we love men not because we like them, not because their ways appeal to us; we love them because God loves them. We come to the point that we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed the person does. And I believe that this is what Jesus meant when

He said, "Love your enemies."

The nonviolent resister has faith in the future.  He somehow believes that the universe is on the side of justice. So he goes about his way, struggling for man's humanity to man, struggling for justice, for the triumph of love, because of this faith in the future and this assurance that he has cosmic companionship as he struggles.

Call it what you may, whether it is Being Itself, with Paul Tillich, or the Principle of Concretion with Whitehead, or whether it is a Process of Integration with Wieman, or whether it is a sort of impersonal Brahman with Hinduism, or whether it is a personal God with boundless power and infinite love, there is something in this universe that works in every moment to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole. There is a power that seeks to bring low prodigious hilltops of evil and pull down gigantic mountings of injustice, and this is the faith, this is the hope that can keep us going amid the tension and the darkness of any moment of social transition. We come to see that the dark of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. This is the faith and the hope that will keep us going.

The nonviolent resister sees within the universe something at the core and the heartbeat of the moral cosmos that makes for togetherness. There is something in this universe which justifies James Russell Lowell in saying,

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

So down in Montgomery, Alabama, we can walk and never get weary, because we know there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.

The problem of race is certainly the chief moral dilemma of our nation. We are faced now with the tremendous responsibility of solving this problem before it is too late. The state of the world today does not permit us the luxury of an anemic democracy, and the clock of destiny is ticking out. We must solve this problem before it is too late. We must go out once more and urge all men of good will to get to work, urge all the agencies of our nation, the federal government, white liberals of the North, white moderates of the South, organized labor, the church and all religious bodies, and the Negro himself.

And all these agencies must come together to work hard now to bring  about  the  fulfillment  of  the  dream  of  our  democracy. Social progress does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes only through persistent work and the tireless efforts of dedicated individuals. Without this persistent work time it becomes the ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation.

I think of the great work that has been done by the Society of Friends. It gives all of us who struggle for justice new hope, and I simply say to you this evening: continue in that struggle, continue with that same determination, and continue with that same faith in the future.

Modern psychology has a word that is used probably more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."

All of us are desirous of living the well-adjusted life. I know I am, and we must be concerned about living a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, as I come to my close, that there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted, and I call upon you to be maladjusted to all of these things. 

I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions which take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

I call upon you to be maladjusted to each of these things. It may be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. So let us be maladjusted. As maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the generations, "Let judgment run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free.

As maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an  age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, "All men are created equal, [and]...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, [and]... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look at the men of his generation and cry out, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you."

Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice. This is what stands ahead. We've made progress, and it is great progress that we must make if we are to fulfill the dreams of our democracy, the dreams of Christianity, the dreams of the great religions of the world.

I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher who didn't have his grammar quite right. But he uttered words with profound meaning. The words were in the form of a prayer: "Lord, we ain't what we want to be, we ain't what we ought to be, we ain't what we gonna' to be, but thank God, we ain't what we was."  And so tonight I say, "We ain't what we ought to be, but thank God we ain't what we was." 

And let us continue, my friends, going on and on toward that great city where all men will live together as brothers in respected dignity and worth of all human personality. This will be a great day, a day, figuratively speaking, when the "morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., is President of the Montgomery, Alabama, Improvement Association. His moving address as given here is somewhat cut. In some of the passages deleted from the first part he spoke of the 50,000 Negro citizens of Montgomery who had ultimately found it "more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation," summarized the history of the Negro in America from 1619 through the nineteenth century, and linked the struggle of the American Negro to attain human dignity with the revolt of oppressed peoples all over the world, particularly in Asia and Africa.

"If I had Sneezed," MLK's Greatest Speech

                                                       "If I had sneezed,..."

MLK's Last Speech "If I had sneezed" - YouTube

"If I Had Sneezed".....A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King - YouTube

King's Final Speech, Forty Years Ago : NPR 

On the dark and stormy night before he was killed in Memphis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last speech, which I think was a sort of premonition of what was going to happen to him:

Reverend Dr. MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr.: Also,

 …In the human rights revolution, if something isn't done and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.

Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis.

Let us stand with a greater determination. And letus move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God once more for allowing me to be here with you.

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City, autographing the first book that I had written. While sitting there autographing books, a black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, are you Martin Luther King?

And I was looking down writing, and I said, yes. The next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it, I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. That blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood, that's the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later they allowed me, after the operation, they allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, Dear Dr. King, I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School. She said, while it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze.

And I want to say tonight - I want to say tonight that I too am happy that I didn't sneeze because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here tp 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that, as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here to 1961, when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation and interstate travel.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

If I had sneezed - if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963. Black people of Birmingham, Alabama aroused the conscience of this nation and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama to see the great movement there.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter, now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning and then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats or talk about the threats that were out, or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop, and I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, and He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

MLK in South Jersey

                                        MLK Being Arrested at Segregated Lunch Counter 

MLK in South Jersey

Martin Luther King, Jr. has a number of important connections to South Jersey. He visited South Jersey often when he attended Crozier College in Philadelphia, and may have stayed at a house in Camden at the time.

Most significant was his experience at Mary’s Café in Maple Shade on Sunday, June 10, 1950, when he and three friends were refused service, an event that led a gun being fired, charges being filed and a court hearing, all of led to his being radicalized and steering him in the direction of seeking civil rights for all.

King also visited Cape May, where he gave a speech in 1958, before he became a national spokesman for civil rights.

One of King’s aides, Clarence Jones, who helped write the “I Have A Dream” Speech, also has a South Jersey connection. Jones was the son of a domestic housekeeper for a wealthy family who owned a second summer home in Longport, on Atlantic City’s Absecon Island at the Jersey Shore. Jones’ first experienced racism in Longport and it too had a dramatic effect on him and his ultimate role in the civil rights movement.

MLK AT MARY'S CAFE, Maple Shade, N.J.

[First posted at White Deer Café blog – Sunday, April 20, 2008 ]

MLK at Mary’s Café in Maple Shade (NJ)

Mary’s Café, until it was recently torn down by the State of New Jersey, was located at the clover leaf overpass intersection of Route 73 and Main Street, Maple Shade, a suburban town between Camden and Morrestown.

When I was riding around the area, the old neighborhood near where I grew up, I stopped by the old highway bar, looked in the door window, and saw the stools upside down on the bar and the interior dirty, dusty and ghostly. But it was pretty much all there, plastic and formica art deco interior that could have been cleaned up and opened as a museum, not of a typical Jersey bar, but the place where Martin Luther King’s attitude on civil rights changed, and thus changed America.

There at least, should be an historical plaque at the curb, letting people know what occurred there on that Sunday afternoon, June 10, 1950.

The account has been memorialized by publishers and ministers, who have taken the liberty to embellish on what they knew of what occurred at Mary’s Café, but the truth is, the experience changed Martin Luther King forever, and was, in retrospect, something of an epiphany that is still having an effect on civil rights in America.

The incident occurred when King was attending Crozier Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. King was driving around that warm Sunday morning with another Crozier student, Walter R. McCall, and their dates, Pearl Smith and Doris Wilson. They stopped at the roadside café, where they were refused service by the proprietor, Ernest Nichols.

There were a few people at the bar that day, so they sat in a booth, but were ignored by Nichols, described as a tall, muscular man of German extraction. After awhile they got the message, but they refused to leave, so Nichols is said to have pulled a pistol from behind the bar, stepped to the door and fired the gun in the air.

That was enough and King and his party left, but that wasn’t the end of it. Walter McCall went looking for a policeman and filed a complaint against Nichols, resulting in his arrest. Although there were three other patrons, witnesses there at the time, one reportedly black, they refused to testify and the charges were dismissed, but not before Nichols’ lawyer, W. Thomas McGann, entered Nichols’ statement into the record.

The incident, while not widely known or published, is often cited as a key spark to Martin Luther King’s radicalism, instigating his civil activism and the beginning of his attempts to achieve civil rights across a broader spectrum. It is mentioned in most chronologies of civil rights actions in the United States, and is mentioned in most accounts, such as:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/king-struggle/print.htm

The listing in the chronological history of the civil rights movement simply reads:

12 June 1950

King, Walter R. McCall, Pearl E. Smith, and Doris Wilson are refused service by Ernest Nichols at Mary’s Cafe in Maple Shade, New Jersey. Nichols fires a gun into the air when they persist in their request for service.

There is an account in one crisp paragraph in Bearing the Cross – MLK and Southern Christian Leadership Conference; (p. 40), by David J. Garrow, which won the 1987 Pulitzer and RFK prizes in biography and literature.

“Towards the end of King’s first year at Crozer, another incident involving a gun took place. King, McCall, and their dates had traveled from Chester into nearby New Jersey and stopped at a restaurant in Maple Shade, outside of Camden. The white proprietor refused to serve the foursome, and they chose to remain seated. The owner became furious, pulled a gun, threatened them, and finally ran outside, firing the pistol in the air. With that, the group chose to leave, and McCall sought out a policeman, with whom they returned to the establishment. McCall pressed charges, and three white witnesses initially agreed to testify against the owner. Parental pressure later changed their minds, and to King’s and McCall’s dismay the matter had to be dropped.”

There is no other reference in the records referring to “Parental pressure,” but surely the three witnesses were locals, who frequented Mary’s Café frequently, and would have more to lose testifying against the owner of their local bar than if they didn’t testify at all.

Statement on Behalf of
Ernest Nichols, State of New Jersey

Vs. Ernest Nichols, by W. Thomas McGann

20 July 1950

Morrestown, N.J.

On 12 June 1950, King, Walter R. McCall, Pearl E. Smith and Doris Wilson had a confrontation with aNew Jersey tavern owner, Ernest Nichols, who refused to serve them. 1. King and his friends charged Nichols with violation of a state civil rights law. Nichol’s statement, prepared by his lawyer, defends his refusal to serve the group and his brandishing of a gun. McGann implies wrongdoing on the part of one of the complainants, who was described as “quite insistent that Mr. Nichols sell him package goods or a bottle and this caused Nichols to become upset and excited because he knew he was being asked to do something which constitutes a violation.” McGann argues that Nichols did not generally refused to serve blacks: “it is well known and can be proven without doubt, that for years Mr. Nichols has served colored persons.” Nichols promises to obey the civil rights statute in the future: “Mr. Nichols steadfastly maintains that he is willing to serve colored folks and knows under the law that he must serve colored patrons.” The case was dropped when three witnesses refused to testify on behalf of the complainants.

State of New Jersey Vs. Ernest Nichols, Defendant.

Around 12:45 A.M., Monday morning June 12, 1950 four colored persons came into the tavern of Ernest Nichols, which is located on Route S-41 and Camden Pike, in the Township of Maple Shade, and the County of Burlington. At the time in question, one of the four walked up to the proprietor, Ernest Nichols, and asked him for “package goods.” This Mr. Nichols refused to sell and stated that it was Sunday and he could not sell “package goods” on Sunday or after 10:00 P.M. on any day. Then the applicant asked for a bottle of beer and it is alleged that Mr. Nichols answered “no beer, Mr.!” Today is Sunday.” The applicant was quite insistent that Mr. Nichols sell him package toods or a bottle and this caused Nichols to become upset and excited because he knew he was being asked to do something which constitutes a violation and which might get him into trouble, were he to submit to the request of the colored man.

It is alleged that Mr. Nichols, while the colored folks were still in his tavern, obtained a gun and walked out the door of his tavern and while outside fired the gun in the air. Mr. Nichols claims that this act was not intended as a threat to his colored patrons. The colored patrons, on the other hand, while they admit that the gun was not pointed at them or any of them, seemed to think that it was a threat. Mr. Nichols on the other hand states that he has been held up before and he wanted to alert his watchdog who was somewhere out side the tavern grounds.

Admittedly my client was excited and upset and perhaps gave the impression that he was and is antagonistic to negroes and did not want to serve them because of their color. On the other hand, it is well known and can be proven without doubt, that for years Mr. Nichols has served colored patrons. I might point out that at the arraignment before Judge Charlton, the Judge, and the prosecuting attorney, George Barbour, Esquire, readily admitted that they knew Mr. Nichols has served colored folks in the past.

Mr. Nichols became so excited and upset because he was under the impression that the visit by the four colored patrons was an obvious attempt to get him to violate the law so that they could report his misconduct and violation to the authorities. He felt that the colored gentleman, who asked for “package goods,” who appeared to be an intelligent man, was well acquainted with the regulation prohibiting taverns from selling bottle goods or “package goods” on Sunday and after 10:00 in the evening. This circumstance, in itself, made my client very suspicious of the actions and requests of the complainants. He thought at the time that surely the colored gentleman knew that his request constituted a violation. I might point out here that at the hearing in Maple Shade one of the colored witnesses admitted that he was asking for something that might constitute a “violation.”

The colored patrons left the tavern within a few minutes and returned again to chat with certain persons at the bar. This tended to confirm my client’s conviction that the complainants were endeavoring to in some way ensnare him in some violation of the law.

Mr. Nichols steadfastly maintains that he is willing to serve colored folks and knows that under the law he must serve colored patrons so long as their requests are lawful and the patrons in question are not under the influence of intoxicants. Mr. Nichols further says that in the past he has served colored patrons and is presently continuing to do so.

This statement is submitted in the spirit of assisting the Prosecutor of the Pleas, of Burlington Countyin the investigation of the case in question. The statement is submitted without prejudice to the rights of the defendant.

[signed as below]

W. Thomas McGann,

Attorney for Ernest Nichols.

Walter Raleigh McCall (1923-1978), the Morehouse classmate of King’s, graduated from Crozer in 1951. He later pursued postgraduate work at Temple University in 1952-1953 and as Atlanta University in 1958. McCall served as dean and chaplain at Fort Valley State College from 1951 until 1957, when he became pastor of  Providence Baptist  Church in Atlanta. He was the director of Morehouse’s School of Religion from 1965 until 1969.

Clarence Jones and MLK

                                Clarence Jones takes notes behind Martin Luther King, Jr.

Clarence Jones, an influential civil rights lawyer and close aide and associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., has written a book “Behind the Dream,” the story of King’s famous March on Washington speech at Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.

Besides preparing the notes for the speech, and ensuring it was copyrighted, Jones stood by King when the speech was delivered, and his book tells the story of how it all came about.

Now a scholar in residence at the MLK Center at Stanford University, Jones has recently done some radio interviews with BBC and National Public Radio in which he recounts some of what is in the book.

Most interesting is the background of Clarence Jones himself.

Born in Philadelphia, Jones’ parents were live-in domestic servants in an apparently well to do Philadelphia home, so young Jones was sent off to a Catholic boarding school where most of the students were orphans, educated by Irish nuns who Jones credits with teaching him how to write well.

One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their employer in Longport, at the Jersey Shore, he went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things that he had never been confronted with before.

When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in Longport.

Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attended Columbia University and after being drafted and given an undesirable discharge for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath, he studied law and became a lawyer.

Moving to California, one day in 1960 Martin Luther King visited him at home, and tried to persuade him to assist him in defending against a trumped up tax evasion case, but Jones turned him down because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move back east.

After being berated by his wife however, Jones attended the church service where King gave the sermon on the subject of the responsibilities of black professionals to assist other less fortunate blacks, after which Jones joined King’s legal team.

To hear the NPR interview with Clarence Jones, or read the transcript:

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132905796/dream-speech-writer-jones-reflects-on-king-jr

Clarence Jones is now in residence at Stanford MLK Center:

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php

MLK In Philadelphia

Listen to how Mr. Robert Bogle, President of The Philadelphia Tribune gets MLK:

Link to Text of Audio File Here 60 second excerpt

King had strong ties to Philadelphia
By Linn Washington Jr., January 14, 2007

Ask 10 people the question which town played a pivotal role in helping shape the Civil Rights philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and 10 out of 10 will most likely name Montgomery, Ala. Not one person would name the small suburban Philadelphia  town of Maple Shade, N.J.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 may have launched King into international recognition, but King’s first legal fight against racial discrimination took place during the summer of 1950 when he filed a lawsuit against a racist bar owner in Maple Shade.

Ask a different group of 10 the question of where and/or how King developed the intellectual framework for his now legendary strategies on non-violent confrontation, and many will mumble something about influences from King’s childhood growing up in that rigidly racist section of America located south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

However, once again, the Philadelphia area, and not King’s hometown of Atlanta, proved the accelerator for incubating the philosophies that would drive his Civil Rights strategies.

King himself acknowledges many transformative experiences he had in and around Philadelphia, experiences that influenced his life in large and small ways.
These influential experiences include King’s attendance at seminary school in Chester, his taking philosophy classes at the University of Pennsylvania and attending lectures in North Philadelphia, which proved important for his life’s vision.

For example, King wrote in his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” that he did not begin “a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil” until he entered the Crozer Seminary, then located in Chester.

King enrolled in Crozer in September 1948 after graduating from Atlanta’s famed Morehouse College.

King may have climbed to the metaphysical mountaintop in Memphis in early 1968 – hours before his tragic assassination – but the Prophet of Peace’s philosophical views on the power of non-violent struggle took root in Philadelphia when he attended lectures on the Indian independence leader Gandhi.

One influential introduction to Gandhi took place on a Sunday in 1949 when King attended a lecture at the Fellowship House, then located on Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia. The speaker that day was Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson, the president of Howard University, who had traveled extensively in India.

King later wrote that he found Johnson’s speech “so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.” Less than a decade after hearing Johnson’s “electrifying” speech, King wrote the notable figure asking for his assistance in the work of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

King, in a Dec. 12, 1957, letter to Johnson, explained that the SCLC sought to “implement through non-violent actions the decisions the NAACP has won in the courts.” King quickly pointed out that the SCLC had “no conflict” with the NAACP.
The purpose of King’s letter to Johnson was to ask him to serve on a national advisory committee for SCLC’s “Crusade For Citizenship,” a campaign devised to double the number of Black voters in the South.

At that time, segregationist laws and racist practices blocked the majority of Southern Blacks from exercising their Constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. Passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – in the wake of massive protests organized by King and others – is one of the major victories of the ’60s era Civil Rights Movement.

While living in the Delaware Valley during the late ’40s and early ’50s, as King’s intellectual acumen expanded during his studies at the Crozer Seminary, his philosophical perspectives also broadened, aided in part by classes that he attended at the University of Pennsylvania.

One of the philosophy classes King audited at Penn was a graduate seminar in the ethics and philosophy of history, taught by professor Elizabeth F. Flower.

King was one of 10 participants in the seminar, which met on the first floor of a building on Walnut Street.

“We had to compete with the noise of the trolley cars on Walnut Street as well as the plumbing noises issuing from the faculty ‘gentlemen’s room,’ which abutted the classroom,” Flowers wrote in a letter decades later. “Martin Luther King’s contribution to the discussion was solid and articulate. Interestingly, questions of discrimination do not seem to have come up, but questions of peace and of conflict, of moral order and the effectiveness of a moral stance (as in Gandhi) were much in the air,” the letter stated.

King’s “thought was already vigorous and well-forged,” Flowers recalled. She also remembered King being intrigued by the activist Mohatma Gandhi and the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Kant “provided several themes which run parallel to the tenor of King’s work,” Flower’s letter continued. Kant saw “humans as objects of respect, simply in virtue of their human rationality, uncrossed by any of the accidents of place, color, creed, origin.”

King’s long sought pilgrimage to India in 1959 – the home of Gandhi – was sponsored by thePhiladelphia based American Friends Service Center (AFSC).

King’s guide during his four-week stay in India was an AFSC representative named James Bristol, who lived in India with his family.

Bristol, who lived in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill section prior to his death, once recalled that the “humble” King received a far bigger reception in India than many heads of state because he was “leading a Third World struggle for decent treatment, using Mahatma Gandhi’s method of non-violence to achieve that end. Martin was a natural for adulation and enthusiastic praise in India.” 

Despite the royal reception, Bristol said King and his wife, Coretta, refused first class accommodations, preferring to live like regular Indians, sitting on the ground and eating off banana leaves.

When King “let his hair down” during late evening talks, three things became clear to Bristol: King was a militant, he deeply loved his enemies and he knew he would be killed some day.

King was deeply appreciative of AFSC’s sponsorship of his pilgrimage to India, which he called a marvelous experience. 

“ Words are inadequate for me to express my appreciation,” King wrote in a March 23, 1959, letter to an AFSC official. While praising Bristol in this letter, King declared that “… I am more convinced than ever before of the potency and rightness of the way of non-violence as a method for social change. I believe I came away with a deeper understanding of non-violence and also a deeper commitment.”

Two years before King’s spiritual pilgrimage to India, he accepted a personal invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to attend the independence ceremonies for the African nation of Ghana.

Nkrumah, like King, had his “Philly Connection,” attending classes at Lincoln University and Penn.

Among the African-American dignitaries invited to the ceremonies by Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-colonial leader, was the noted Philadelphia businessman, scholar and theologian Bishop R.R. Wright Jr., a pioneering Black banker and the first Black to receive a Ph.D. in sociology from Penn.

The sting of living in a segregated society was deeply embedded in King’s psyche before he came to the Crozer Seminary.

King’s first smack of racism came when he was 6 years old, according to an autobiography of religious development he wrote while at Crozer. This ugly incident occurred when the father of a white childhood friend forbade his son from playing with young Martin simply because King was a Negro.

“Here, for the first time, I was made aware of the existence of a race problem,” King wrote in this autobiography. “From that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.” However, King’s parent’s “would always tell me that I should not hate the white man … that it was my duty as a Christian to love him.”

King discussed how he wrestled with the dilemma of how to love people who hated him. King admitted that he “did not conquer this anti-white feeling until I entered college and came in contact with white students through working in interracial organizations.”

That childhood Atlanta experience was King’s first incidence of racism, but it was seeing a white man point a gun at him in anger that spurred King’s first anti-discrimination lawsuit.

One summer Sunday evening in 1950 when King, his seminary friend Walter McCall and their dates stopped at a Maple Shade, N.J. tavern for a beer, they were denied service by the tavern’s owner, Ernest Nichols.

Nichols cursed the two couples, chasing them from his tavern with a drawn gun. Close friends say King was “livid.” As a well-read person, King knew that New Jersey had one of the few anti-discrimination laws then in existence and decided to fight back with a lawsuit. 

King pressed charges and Nichols was found guilty of weapons charges and fined $50.

A civil lawsuit King filed against Nichols with the aid of the Camden NAACP office was later dropped. Many agree that King’s critical views on the Vietnam War were influenced by Philadelphia’s vibrant anti-war movement in the ’60s.

King’s linkage of the Black American Civil Rights struggle with the freedom struggles of other oppressed peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America received early expression during speeches in the Philadelphia area. During a June 1958 speech in Cape May, N.J., King stated the Civil Rights Movement of African-Americans is part of “a worldwide revolt against the slavery and oppression of colonialism and imperialism.”

King returned to Philadelphia frequently throughout his career, both for business and relaxation. Fifteen thousand people attended one 1965 street corner rally where King spoke in Philadelphia. In the months before his April 1968 death, King came to Philadelphia often as he prepared for what would be his final major protest campaign.

King opened the first satellite office for his Poor People’s Campaign inside the real estate office onDiamond Street, owned by C. Delores Tucker.

“Martin was a man of peace,” Tucker once recalled. “But he was obsessed with economic and social justice for everyone, Blacks-whites-Hispanics, Christians and Jews.”

The Poor Peoples Campaign was a protest effort planned for Washington, D.C., to improve conditions of poor people of all colors. 

A month after his Philadelphia office opened, King was murdered by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, while he was in Memphis, Tenn., supporting striking African-American sanitation workers.

“Martin always said Philadelphia responded to him so well and he found friends here who stayed with him for life,” said Tucker, founder of  Philadelphia’s Martin Luther  King Center for Social Change. “He always found a responsive community for brotherhood in Philadelphia.”

MLK House in Camden, NJ

POSTED: Monday, January 16, 2012, 8:00 PM

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/camden_flow/137450381.html

CRAMER HILL- Community Organizing

Organizations all over Camden had MLK Day events on Monday. But one church decided to take a different approach to honoring and remembering Dr. King.

About 80 students (middle school through college) from around the region met at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood for a day of community organizing, instead of service.

“We feel that community service dilutes” Dr. King’s mission and message to the people, said Fr. Jud Weiksnar, pastor at St. Anthony of Padua.

So, instead of performing service, youths and church leaders met with some city and county officials to ask about abandoned homes and illegal dumping in Camden. They also walked the neighborhood to see the results of earlier group leadership, such as a community garden and the finally vacant field where the rundown Ron’s House once stood and which will soon be the site of a playground.

“It was a really unique experience for the kids,” Weiksnar said.  Dr. King “wanted people to get organized and work for justice.”

 BERGEN SQUARE- MLK House

In the middle of Camden’s Bergen Square neighborhood, among rows of vacant and boarded-up homes, 940 Newton Ave. looks no different.

But to the few dozen people who showed up today, including Young Urban Leaders founder and School Board Member Sean Brown, the house is special. According to legend, the rowhouse was Martin Luther King Jr.’s residence while he attended Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester in the late 1940s.

On Monday, Brown and a Who’s Who of young Camden leaders – including Felix Moulier, a chair of one of the District Council Collaborative Boards; Keanna Ralph, who served as spokeswoman for former Mayor Gwendolyn Faison; Micah Khan, of the Nehemiah Group; Elton Custis, former City Council candidate –- ripped open the boarded-up door and started cleaning up the house.  The partially burnt shell will be transformed into office space for the Young Urban Leaders, a group of community-involved Camden residents roughly between the ages of 20 and 35, to host seminars and help Camden youths with college applications.

Once Heart of Camden receives the title for the property, it will turn it over to the Young Urban Leaders. It is currently going through the foreclosure process.

“It will be a shrine and inspiration to all of us,” Fr. Michael Doyle, of Sacred Heart Church, told the crowd standing at the house, near a giant pile of debris.

For the record, I checked with local historians Paul Schopp and Phil Cohen to get confirmation on Dr. King’s stay in Camden. They both said that unless there is concrete proof (i.e.- phone records, genealogy reports)  they aren’t buying the claim that the future civil rights leader lived in Camden.

“As far as I know, Martin Luther King Jr. never stepped foot in Camden,” Schopp said.

Cohen went further and while I was on the phone with him, he checked a phone book from  1947, when Dr. King was in seminary (Cohen loves this stuff, check out his website which is full of fun Camden history--http://www.dvrbs.com/) and found that a Russell Pierce lived at 940 Newton then. So unless someone can prove a connection between Pierce and Dr. King, he isn’t buying it the claim either.

I told Sean Brown, the founder of Young Urban Leaders, and he agreed that he does not have concrete proof, but he is confident that Dr. King did live there at some point.

Nevertheless, Brown and company got together on a frigid day to honor Dr. King and start transforming a dirty, charred house into a community gathering spot.

“Martin Luther King Day is a day to honor his legacy by doing service work around the country,” Brown said. “We agreed it would be the perfect day to start restoring the house.”