In Alabama, honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on King Day means sharing memories.
In Birmingham, King taught love in the face of hate.
This January would have marked King’s 91st birthday.
King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta. He was killed on April 4, 1968, in Memphis. King’s wife, Coretta, was born in Marion, King was a pastor in Montgomery, and Alabama was a major backdrop for the events of his life, including the setting for his classic 1963 plea for civil rights, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The civil rights activist is commemorated in many places in Birmingham, including with a statue in Kelly Ingram Park, and throughout Alabama. He was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery from 1954-60, where he rose to national prominence as a spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56. He led civil rights marches in Birmingham in 1963 that reverberated throughout the nation. He led the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent campaign against segregation.
In addition to the influence of Jesus and Mohandas K. Gandhi, King’s ideas reflected the teachings of a devoutly religious family - his father, maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were ministers. He was also strongly influenced by the personalist philosophy taught at Boston University School of Theology, where King received his doctorate in 1955.
King’s life was molded by the circumstances that gave rise to practical application of his theology. Many scholars have noted that King may well have had a relatively quiet life as a minister and theology professor after he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the ’'whites only’' section of a segregated bus, King was thrust into leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
King’s philosophy always emphasized a basic tenet of Christianity: forgiveness. In “Stride Toward Freedom,” King wrote that forgiveness was the favorite topic of mass meetings during the boycott. It remained a dominant theme of the movement.
King is more than a legendary figure to those in Birmingham who knew him personally.
“It was like he was leading a rescue mission for the world,” said Jeff Drew, whose father, John, operated Alexander and Co. Insurance Agency in Birmingham, which had insured church vans during the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Drew’s mother, Deenie, was known as the den mother of the civil rights movement. King often stayed at their house on visits to Birmingham from the late 1950s through 1968. “He was a giant, and a giant for all men,” Drew said.
The Rev. Wilson Fallin Jr., a Birmingham pastor and historian who hosted King speaking as pastor of New Zion Baptist Church in Bessemer in 1968, said that King was calm in the face of the death threats surrounding him at the time.
After King spoke to help set the stage for the Poor People’s Campaign Mule Train of 1968, Fallin took King, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to eat dinner at the home of church member Bessy Wilkins, a woman in her 70s, who cooked dinner.
’'He teased Ralph about being born in the Black Belt and that he thought he knew about collard greens,’' Fallin said. “It was hardly more than a month later that King was killed.”
He was a legendary man, but also a man who loved to eat and joke and talk, Fallin said.
’'He was a man that loved life,’' Fallin said.
For Drew, who first met King when he was about seven years old and was 16 when King last stayed with the family shortly before his death, the civil rights leader’s visits to Birmingham were commonplace, but also historic.
The Drew house was on Center Street, a dividing line between whites and blacks. Blacks were allowed to live on the east side of the street, but when they bought houses on the west side of the street, they were often attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
The North Smithfield community was nicknamed Dynamite Hill because it was bombed so often. The home of attorney Arthur Shores, one of the first blacks to practice law in Alabama, was bombed twice in 1963 and targeted in 1965.
King knew that, but stayed in the neighborhood anyway. He tried to keep his visits secret so the Drew family wouldn’t be targeted. “Part of his secrecy was to protect the families in the homes he was visiting,” Drew said. “He knew he was a target.”
History was happening, and that was apparent at the time.
“All of us Dynamite Hill kids, we knew something special was going on,” Drew said.
