Posted on Monday, January 16, 2017

Discovering Atlanta Through the Eyes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Driver Tom Houck…A Repost…

(me and my hubby & Tom Houck and another tour goer)

Editor’s Note: I originally wrote this post in 2016, but in honor of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday today, I thought I would share it again. Enjoy 🙂

Hello World,

Last week my husband Robert and I were thinking about what we could do to celebrate the sixth anniversary of our first date yesterday. As I was listening to 1380AM WAOK on the way home from work on Wednesday, I realized I had a fun and educational option. Derrick Boazman host of “Too Much Truth” was interviewing Tom Houck whom I had never heard of before. Tom, a white man, was the driver of Dr. King and his family for several months. In a gruff, hearty voice likely emboldened because of the precious history he possesses, Tom described how being kicked out of high school in Jacksonville, Florida for merely participating in a Selma march in 1965 eventually led to being in the inner sanctum of the very leader of the Civil Rights Movement as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s driver.

In 1966, Tom’s civil rights activism brought him to Atlanta to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In one of those fortuitous moments that forever changes someone’s life, Dr. King saw Tom across the street from the SCLC where he had gone to make a call on the pay phone and invited the 19-year-old to have lunch with him and his family. That lunch led to him being asked to drive for the King Family. Tom describes his experiences as their driver as a part of his Civil Rights Tour, a bus tour in which Tom takes people to see the historic sites in Atlanta that provided the landscape of the capital of the Civil Rights Movement.

At the end of the conversation, Tom offered two tickets to the first person who e-mailed him the answer to this question: What was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s real first name. I was literally pulling into my driveway when I heard him ask the question. I parked, unlocked my front door and ran to my computer, hurriedly e-mailing him the answer: Michael. For the first five years of Dr. King’s life, his name was Michael. However, when his father Michael King Sr. changed his name to Martin Luther King Sr. after becoming inspired by Martin Luther, his son, who was Michael King Jr., became Martin Luther King Jr. I nearly fell off of my bed when I received an e-mail later that evening from Tom letting me know that I had won the tickets! I told my husband we could celebrate our history as a couple by celebrating the history of our beloved city. He agreed that it would be a great way to celebrate our first date anniversary!

Tom Houck beginning his tour…

My hubby focusing on Tom…

Dr. King’s first home is in the Old Fourth Ward area of Atlanta which was once known as Shermantown after General Sherman took over the area during the Civil War. The home is on Auburn Avenue known as Sweet Auburn, but I didn’t know that Auburn Avenue was once Wheat Street. However, the name of the street was later changed because Wheat Street was thought to be too rural of a name for a metropolitan street. Yes, Sweet Wheat doesn’t sound as cool for sure! But that explains the name of the historical Wheat Street Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Wheat Street Baptist Church was the site of the church scenes filmed in the movie “Selma,” Tom told us.

In the beginning of the tour, we went by Dr. King’s elementary school Howard Elementary School. The school building, which is vacant, later became a high school which has notable graduates including Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor; Walt Frazier and Vernon Jordan. Tom also took us to the SNCC Freedom House. Freedom Houses were designated places where civil rights workers could retreat and reside.

The site of the pay phone where Tom met Dr. King…

Tom met Dr. King across the street of the SCLC headquarters, which I took a picture of from the bus…Not the best picture, but you get the idea hopefully…

Morris Brown College, the only HBCU founded by black people, was organized in the basement of Big Bethel AME Church, which is located in the Sweet Auburn district…Civil rights leader Hosea Williams and Derrick Bozeman are Morris Brown College graduates…

See that blue sign? It is the sign for the original site of the Atlanta Daily World, the oldest black newspaper in the city…It was once a Republican newspaper as blacks were mostly Republican years ago since most segregationists were Democrats…

A Loss Prevention Hero series mural honoring Congressman John Lewis…

The second The Loss Prevention Hero series mural honoring Mrs. Evelyn Gibson Lowery, the deceased wife of Rev. Joseph Lowery. Mrs. Lowery founded SCLC/Women’s Organizational Movement for Equality Now, Inc.

Although it wasn’t an official part of the tour, Tom told us that Citizens Trust Bank, which was founded by black businessman Heman Perry, on Auburn Avenue, was where he received his first car loan! AND Daddy King, who was on the bank’s board of directors, co-signed the loan!!!

Before we left the Sweet Auburn district, we learned about John Wesley Dobbs, a rail clerk who was unofficially named the mayor of Sweet Auburn because of his work to achieve equality for black people…Seemingly in homage to Dobbs, Atlanta’s public schools were integrated on the day of this death, August 30, 1961, Tom told us…Above is a statue honoring Dobbs, who is the grandfather of Maynard Jackson…All of his six daughters graduated from Spelman College. They are reported to be the largest group of sisters to graduate from the school…Incidentally, I interviewed Dr. June Dobbs Butts, the youngest of the sisters and a sex therapist, for an UPSCALE magazine article I wrote years ago…

We rode by the now defunct Terminal Station, which was once a prominent train station in the city. Atlanta was once named Terminus which I originally learned after watching “The Walking Dead,” which is back tonight!!! Yay!!! And before Terminus, Atlanta was known as Marthasville. I cannot see Atlanta residents calling ourselves Termliens or Marthaaliens so I’m glad we changed to Atlanta because ATLlien is so doggone cool…

We passed through the Castleberry Hill District, which was revitalized by Herman J. Russell, a construction magnate…I had the opportunity to meet him just months before he passed away in 2014. He attended the National Book Club Conference while promoting his book Building Atlanta: How I Broke Through Segregation to Launch a Business Empire.”

Tom took us to Dr. King’s last home before he died which is located at 234 Sunset Avenue…

Daryl, a recent graduate of Clark Atlanta University, sang freedom songs as we passed by some of the historical stops…

Along the way, we passed by Washington High School where Dr. King graduated from when he was 15 years old to attend Morehouse College. I did not know that Lena Horne also attended Washington High School!

One of the stops was the home of Alonzo Herndon, who was once Atlanta’s wealthiest black man. Herndon built his fortune on his barbering business. His stately home is across the street from the home of Grace Towns Hamilton, the first black woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly. Unfortunately, her home was barely visible due to the overgrowth of weeds as well as the overall decay of the structure…We also passed through the Atlanta University Center and by the original Paschal’s Restaurant location as well as Busy Bee Café.

One of our final stops was South-View Cemetery, which is located on Jonesboro Road and was designed “to provide a respectable place for Christian burials” for all people including black people who were once not allowed to be buried in certain cemetaries. It opened on April 21, 1886. It began as 26 acres and is now over 100 acres. 80,000 people are buried there including Herman J. Russell and the wife of John Lewis, Lillian Miles Lewis. Below are pics of the graves of other important people who are also buried there…

The grave site of John Wesley Dobbs

The grave sites of Daddy King and his wife Alberta King…

If you look at to upper left of the grave marker, you can see this tiny picture of Daddy King….

Dr. King was originally buried in South-View cemetery before his body was moved in 1970 to its current location alongside his wife at the King Center. One the way back to Auburn Avenue where we started the tour, we passed by Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Tom told us that Marcus Garvey was imprisoned there which is interesting to me as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants.

We learned much more that I wasn’t even able to include in this already lengthy blog post!

And hopefully, you will be inspired to take a Civil Rights Tour with Tom Houck, the driver of Dr. King and his family. For more information, go to civilrightstour.com.

Enjoy your Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday!

Any thoughts?

Posted on Monday, January 19, 2015

Soul Mates: Dr. Martin Luther Jr. & Coretta Scott King…repost…

Editor’s Note: This post is from 2011, but I always love a good love story…Read and enjoy…Happy MLK Day 2015!!!

Hello World,

As you know, I love to write about love and marriage. In fact, I have dedicated a whole section on my blog to married couples, Soul Mates. While I know that many people do not believe in soul mates, I would like to believe that God has a hand in orchestrating great love stories that end in marriage. Today, we officially celebrate the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But from Dr. King to President Obama, their wives had a hand in making them great men. While I will never get the opportunity to interview Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, I still want to feature their story on my blog. So I have decided to post interesting quotations about their marriage. Read, enjoy and take note…

Born and raised in Marion, Alabama, Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln High School. She received a B.A. in music and education from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then went on to study concert singing at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin. While in Boston she met Martin Luther King, Jr. who was then studying for his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. They were married on June 18, 1953, and in September 1954 took up residence in Montgomery, Alabama, with Coretta Scott King assuming the many functions of pastor’s wife at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. (from The King Center website)
While studying music, she met King, then pursuing a PhD at Boston University. “…he was looking for a wife. I wasn’t looking for a husband, but he was a wonderful human being,” she told an interviewer. “I still resisted his overtures, but after he persisted, I had to pray about it…I had a dream, and in that dream, I was made to feel that I should allow myself to be open and stop fighting the relationship. That’s what I did, and of course the rest is history. ” (from About.com)
Martin, about their first date: “So you can do something else besides sing? You’ve got a good mind also. You have everything I ever wanted in a woman. We ought to get married someday.” (from About.com)
She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all.” A year later, she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. (from The New York Times)
Her first encounter with the man who would become her husband did not begin auspiciously, as recounted in “Parting the Waters,” by Taylor Branch. Dr. King, very much in the market for a wife, called her after getting her name from a friend and announced: “You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo,” he said. “I’m like Napoleon. I’m at my Waterloo, and I’m on my knees.” Ms. Scott, two years his elder, replied: “That’s absurd. You don’t even know me.” (from The New York Times)
Still, she agreed to meet for lunch the next day, only to be put off initially that he was not taller. But she was impressed by his erudition and confidence, and he saw in this refined, intelligent woman what he was looking for as the wife of a preacher from one of Atlanta’s most prominent ministerial families. When he proposed, she deliberated for six months before saying yes, and they were married in the garden of her parents’ house on June 18, 1953. The 350 guests, elegant big-city folks from Atlanta and rural neighbors from Alabama, made it the biggest wedding, white or black, the area had ever seen. (from The New York Times)
Even before the wedding, she made it clear she intended to remain her own woman. She stunned Dr. King’s father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., who presided over the wedding, by demanding that the promise to obey her husband be removed from the wedding vows. Reluctantly, he went along. After it was over, the bridegroom fell asleep in the car on the way back to Atlanta while the new Mrs. King did the driving. (from The New York Times)
“I had no problem being the wife of Martin, but I was never just a wife. In the 1950s, as a concert singer, I performed ‘freedom concerts’ raising funds for the movement. I ran my household, raised my children, and spoke out on world issues. Maybe people didn’t know that I was always an activist because the media wasn’t watching. I once told Martin that although I loved being his wife and a mother, if that was all I did I would have gone crazy. I felt a calling on my life from an early age. I knew I had something to contribute to the world.” (from The Washington Post)
The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King (November 17, 1955 – May 15, 2007) (October 23, 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama), Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King (January 30, 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia), Bernice Albertine King (March 28, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia) All four children later followed in their parents’ footsteps as civil rights activists. (from Wikipedia)
Scott King became an activist in her own right, as well, carrying messages of international peace and economic justice to organizations around the world. She was the first woman to deliver the Class Day address at Harvard University and the first woman to preach during a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. When King was assassinated outside a motel room in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, Scott King channeled her grief into action. Days later, she led a march through the streets of Memphis, and later that year took his place as a leader of the Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C. (from ABC News)
And to carry on that legacy, she focused on two ambitious and daunting tasks. The first was to have a national holiday in his honor, the second was to build a nationally recognized center in Atlanta to honor his memory, continue his work and provide a research center for scholars studying his work and the civil rights era. The first goal was achieved despite much opposition in 1983 when Congress approved a measure designating the third Monday in January as an official federal holiday in honor of Dr. King, who was born in Atlanta Jan. 15, 1929. (from The Washington Post)
Over 14,000 people gathered for Coretta Scott King’s eight-hour funeral at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia on February 7, 2006 where daughter Bernice King eulogized her mother. The megachurch, whose sanctuary seats 10,000, was better able to handle the expected massive crowds than Ebenezer Baptist Church, of which Coretta was a member since the early 1960s and which was the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in 1968. (from Wikipedia)

Any thoughts?

Posted on Monday, January 20, 2014

Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church….NEW BOOK ALERT!

Hello World,

TODAY is the official Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday! I hope wherever you are – whether at home or work or serving your community, I hope you pause to remember the dream of Dr. King and how he inspired the nation to come together in equality and peace…

One of my friends, Edward Gilbreath, who is an award-winning journalist and author, and the executive director of communications for the Evangelical Covenant Church, wrote “Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church” a new book about Dr. King. Below is an interview with Gilbreath about his latest book.

Countless books and articles have been written about Martin Luther King Jr. over the years. What inspired you to share another perspective on King in “Birmingham Revolution?”

Edward Gilbreath: There’s a multitude of books about King and the civil rights movement, but I felt compelled to tell the story from the perspective of an African American evangelical who was born a year after Dr. King’s death. Many people from my generation and younger don’t always have a full picture of who King really was—his courage, his radicalism, his faith, his humanity. I wanted to shed light on these aspects of King and, above all, show the church that everything he did was driven by his Christian faith and values. I also think the evangelical community—especially the white evangelical community—has had an uneasy relationship with Dr. King over the years. They’ve wrestled with embracing his vision of racial and social justice but have struggled with accepting his progressive theology. And at times, they’ve used questions about his theology as an excuse for dismissing him altogether.

I want to show that King’s vision was actually more in tune with a complete understanding of the Christian gospel. That despite his failings as a flawed human being, he was operating out of a God-inspired, prophetic Christian vision of justice and reconciliation. Many evangelicals are just now catching up to what King was articulating fifty years ago. I hope Birmingham Revolution can be an entry way for many evangelicals to discover King anew.

What was significant about Birmingham as a stage for the civil rights movement?

Edward: In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most notorious strongholds of segregation and white supremacy in the South. It was a place described by King as “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” Not only were the public institutions, such as libraries, segregated but it was so severe that even books that contained photos of black rabbits and white rabbits together were banned from the library shelves. It was a city where bullets, bombs and burning crosses served as constant deterrents to blacks who aspired to anything greater than their assigned station of inequality.

There, in April 1963, King and his movement of nonviolent protesters staged a campaign that would transform America. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a fiery Baptist preacher in Birmingham, had implored King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference associates to come to Birmingham and help the city’s black community confront segregation. He told them, “I assure you, if you come to Birmingham, we will not only gain prestige but really shake the country.”

He knew that if the movement could change things in Birmingham, it would reverberate throughout the nation.

How is “Birmingham Revolution” different than your mini ebook, “Remembering Birmingham?”

Edward: “Remembering Birmingham” focuses on the events of Birmingham in April 1963 while “Birmingham Revolution” takes a more extensive survey of King’s life, both before and after Birmingham. It’s a dynamic story, replete with action, drama and compelling ideas. I believe the Birmingham campaign was the touchstone for all that came before and all that would follow in King’s brief but remarkable thirty-nine years of life and ministry, and Birmingham Revolution will help readers understand why.

What was the significance of King’s “Letter from Birmingham”?

Edward: The Birmingham campaign started out slowly, but after King was arrested on Good Friday for his movement’s public demonstration on the streets of Birmingham, things began to change. While in solitary confinement, he was shown a newspaper op-ed column by eight moderate clergymen in Birmingham. While they supported civil rights for blacks, they felt King and his movement were going about it all wrong. They implored him to wait for the laws to take effect. But King believed the black community had waited long enough, they needed to take a stand and stir the conscience of Birmingham and of the nation.

His response to the op-ed was a passionate letter that spelled out the reasons why the movement couldn’t wait and pointed out the differences between just and unjust laws. He wrote the letter on the margins of the newspaper, on scraps of any paper he could gather, and when he ran out, he reportedly wrote on the toilet paper in his cell. After its publication weeks later, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would become one of the most lucid and convincing arguments for social justice and civil rights that we’ve ever had. What’s more, it was rooted in the theology and principles of the Christian gospel.

Why do you think King was more a “prophet” of social justice?

Edward: It’s easy to want to write Dr. King off as just a leader who gave a good speech. But in doing that, we risk missing the fact that he was vehemently disliked in his day and that as time went on he was becoming increasingly angry and impatient with the pace of change in the nation. Late in his life he wrote that, “Whites are not putting in a mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance.”

While he rejected the militancy of the Black Power movement, he understood the roots of its members’ discontent. As a Christian minister and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, King also felt compelled to speak out against the Vietnam conflict. This also served to land him on some of America’s “most hated” lists. In all these cases, he was speaking out as a prophet of social justice. But that’s typically not the King that we choose to focus on today.

What do you hope readers take away from “Birmingham Revolution?”

Edward: I want people to discover the full humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to move beyond viewing him as this gentle “I Have a Dream” character to seeing him as the prophetic and often radical Christian visionary that he was. I want people to discover and rediscover Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a message encompassing his holistic vision of the gospel lived out in everyday life. I want people to understand that the civil rights movement was indeed a Christian movement, birthed in the church by a grass-roots movement of ordinary men, women and youth who relied on the Holy Spirit and a gospel-inspired vision to rise to the challenge of confronting the social injustice in their daily lives.

I want my Christian readers to understand that Dr. King’s message continues to have relevance for the church today for our response to issues such as immigration reform, the public education crisis, inequalities in our criminal justice system or racial reconciliation. We are called to live out the truth of the gospel both as a call to personal salvation and social justice.