MLK’s Pennsylvania connection
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is most associated with Southern states, from his home state of Georgia to Alabama, where he helped lead a 1955 bus boycott, to Tennessee, where he was assassinated in 1968.
But Northern states, including Pennsylvania, also played a pivotal role in King's life, both before and during his career as a minister and civil rights activist. It was in Pennsylvania, in fact, where King first accepted nonviolence, which would define his work in the civil rights movement until his death.
King first came to Pennsylvania in the late 1940s. He enrolled in Crozier Theological Seminary in 1948, one of only 11 Black students in the school.
The next year, King heard Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, speak about Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to nonviolence. King previously had rejected pacifism as a serious way to address the social problems he hoped to help fix, but after that talk, he bought Gandhi's books.
In the end, the idea of nonviolence would develop continually over the rest of King's life, but it would remain central for him. The King Center, which was created by Coretta Scott King, lists six principles of King's philosophy of nonviolence, taken from his book, "Strides Toward Freedom."
1: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
2: Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
3: Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, or evil, not people.
4: Nonviolence holds that unearned, voluntary suffering for a just cause can educate and transform people and societies.
5: Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
6: Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
In 1951, King graduated from Crozier first in his class, and used a fellowship from the seminary to complete a doctorate from Boston University in 1955, after which he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
A historical marker, dedicated in 1992, sits outside of Crozer-Chester Medical Center, which was once the main building of the seminary.
King's departure from Philadelphia in 1951 wasn't the end of his association with that city, which he would visit multiple times between then and 1968, nor of his connection with the state as a whole.
In May 1956, about a year after he took the pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist, King visited Pittsburgh for the first time. He was gaining national recognition, as he was in the midst of serving as spokesman for the bus boycott initiated when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white rider.
He came to Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood, where he spoke to young people at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
In 1958, a year after he helped found and was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he returned to Pittsburgh, this time to preach at Central Baptist Church.
Two years later, in 1960, and again in 1961, King was the headliner at a pair of Freedom Jubilees held at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. He offered up a defense of nonviolence, saying violence would only cause more harm.
"A much better and more creative way open to the Negro is nonviolence," he said.
After two more years, during which time King had become probably the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement, he returned, speaking about integration to the Conference of Commissions of Human Rights.
Months later, he would use the Keystone state during his most well-known speech, "I Have a Dream," which he gave during the March on Washington.
"Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania," he said.
In 1964, when he was 35 years old, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He vowed to use the more than $50,000 that came with the prize for the civil rights movement.
When he accepted the award in Oslo, he offered some of his most iconic words, which were deeply informed by the commitment to nonviolence he first developed in Philadelphia.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality," he said. "This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
King was already the primary leader of the civil rights movement in the United States by then, but his stature continued to grow. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965, partly in response to King's protests in Selma, Ala., including the event known as "Bloody Sunday," on March 7, 1965, where King and hundreds of other protesters marched from Selma to the state's capital, Montgomery.
King's final visit to Pittsburgh would be in November 1966, when he spoke at the University of Pittsburgh Student Union. The hour-long speech drew such large crowds of students that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported hundreds stood in hallways or sat in other rooms, listening to the speech on loudspeakers.
King continued to visit Philadelphia, making dozens of stops there between 1955 and 1968. Among the most prominent was in August 1965, when King and Cecil B. Moore, leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, protested at Girard College, demanding the school admit Black students.
In the last years of his life, King became an increasingly vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and that was the reason for his final visit to Philadelphia, in February 1968. King was in the city organizing a campaign against the war when he was diagnosed with laryngitis and treated by Dr. Walter P. Lomax, a well-known Black doctor and philanthropist.
In late March, King went to Memphis, Tenn., to help striking garbage workers. After a march he led turned chaotic and then descended into violence on March 28, King returned to Memphis in early April to lead another rally, this one peaceful. His final speech was "I Have Been to the Mountaintop," delivered the day before he was shot and killed on the balcony of the motel where he was staying.
In the wake of his death, riots broke out in cities nationwide, including many in Pennsylvania. But near the end of King's final speech he predicted both the turmoil and the resolution that would come after.
"Well, I don't know what will happen now," he said. "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'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!"
