Herbert L. White
THE CHARLOTTE POST
In 2015, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech was confirmed to have North Carolina roots.
At that time, a restored recording of a Nov. 27, 1962, speech at a Rocky Mount high school gym was unveiled, providing proof that one of the greatest pieces of American oratory was given in an intimate setting that confirmed the state’s significance in the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, there were other significant instances before King’s Rocky Mount speech, like similar oratory King used in Charlotte a couple of years previous.
North Carolina is a key location in the modern Civil Rights Movement as well as King’s impact on it. The sit-in movement was launched by North Carolina A&T State University students in Greensboro in early 1960, as well as King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) he led held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh to encourage local sit-in leaders to utilize non-violent protests against racial discrimination.
Two years before the sit-ins, King spoke at Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel on the Bennett College campus in Greensboro to charge students and civil rights supporters to agitate for voting rights. At that time, southern states disenfranchised Black citizens by law and custom.
“I’m not here to tell you how to vote,” he said. “That isn’t my concern. I’m not a politician. I have no political ambitions. I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.”
Those efforts paid dividends. By August 1960, sit-ins led to desegregated lunch counters in 27 southern cities; in 1964 and 1965, federal law broke the back of racial discrimination in public places and the ballot box.
King and North Carolina were intertwined as the movement unfolded, which spawned its own distinct branch of dynamic activism.
Kelly Alexander Sr., whose father owned and operated Charlotte’s only Black funeral home, became a civil rights activist through the NAACP in the 1930s. He was eager to involve King in local matters after the Baptist minister became a national figure while leading the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which forced desegregation of public transit in that city. King was familiar with Charlotte: A year earlier, he visited Johnson C. Smith University and flew out of the new Douglas Airport (now Charlotte Douglas International Airport) for the National Baptist Convention.
According to Charlotte Museum of History historian Angel Johnston, Alexander wrote King in 1958 to invite him back for a speaking engagement. Alexander wrote: “There is still too much apathy and still much work to be done. We know your visit here will be of great advantage.” King was believed to have accepted the offer but was stabbed at a book signing event in New York City before his scheduled visit. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s top lieutenant, went in his stead.
King returned to Charlotte on Sept. 25, 1960, when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP arranged him to speak at Charlotte Park Center – now Grady Cole Center. Harry Golden, a Charlotte journalist and a leader in the city’s Jewish community, introduced King, who spoke to an audience estimated at 2,700 on “The Negro and the American Dream.” Among the more notable passages that would become more familiar three years later in Washington, D.C.: “In a real sense America is essentially a dream – a dream yet unfulfilled. It is a dream of a land where men of all races, colors and creeds will live together as brothers” and “Slavery and segregation have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principles that all men are created equal.”
After the height of King’s activism in the mid-1960s – a Nobel Prize in 1964 and federal civil rights legislation in ’64 and ’65 – his popularity waned. National fatigue over civil rights gains, growing challenges to King’s nonviolent philosophy and his opposition to President Lyndon Johnson’s prosecution of the Vietnam War drove down King’s popularity. A 1966 Gallup poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans held an unfavorable opinion of King, a 26-point increase compared to 1963.
Quality of leadership, he maintained, isn’t exclusive to surveys.
“I’m not a consensus taker,” King told 3,000 people Sept. 21, 1966, at JCSU’s Hartley-Woods Gymnasium. “I don’t decide what’s wrong by taking a Gallup Poll.”
