Standing in the midst of history, looking forward

We stood on the porch where a bomb went off late at night January 30, 1956 at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, as the bus boycott in that city was in its second month.

We stood in the kitchen where King three nights earlier sat with a cup of coffee late at night after a vitriolic threatening phone call, where he sat and sensed God’s presence with him in his quest for justice.

We sat in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King arrived in 1954 as a young pastor to serve a congregation with a deep heritage of activism. Just over a year later, he was propelled into a leadership position in the bus boycott.

We sat in the sanctuary of Holt Street Baptist Church and listened to the recording of King giving the powerful speech on the night of Dec. 5, 1955 when 5,000 people came together to vote to continue what had been a one-day boycott of the Montgomery buses until the bus company agreed to treat black passengers with dignity. That boycott lasted 382 days until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional.

We stood in the room at the Civil Rights Memorial Center where powerful videos and many plaques marked so many who died in the struggle for civil rights and then walked into the hallway calling on a new generation to “fight today for a better tomorrow.” And we signed a commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion for all.

Each stop on this day of the Civil Rights pilgrimage for eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison provided a connection to the past and a window to what could be in the future. Each one reminded us of the risks and the possibilities that generations past embraced and challenged us to think of ways to indeed keep the quest for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion alive for our time in the midst of all the current headwinds.

A few other things that struck me and others from the day:

The history of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church beyond King’s role is fascinating. It was originally organized in 1877 a place that had been a slave-trader’s pen – the place where slaves were kept until they were brought to one of Montgomery’s four slave-auction warehouses to be sold. 

Then the congregation bought the current lot two blocks from the Alabama Capitol in 1879, despite the objections of some white residents that they did not want a black church so close to the seat of government – a government committed to white supremacy.

Our guide at Dexter, Nikki Davis, told us that in the early 1900s, the church got the first pipe organ of any black church in Montgomery – but it had no one who could play the organ. 

A teen who could play the piano was connected to the organist at a white Baptist church and the two of them met under the cover of darkness so she could learn to play. And play she did – into her 90s.

Wanda Anderson, part of the Dexter Tourism Ministry who greeted us at the parsonage, knew King’s oldest daughter when they were children. Later, she was at Dexter in 1967 when King came back to preach at the church’s centennial. While they gathered inside the church, the KKK marched outside in full regalia. 

Nikki Davis told us that in the midst of current efforts to roll back black history and diminish the rights of so many, “We continue to do the things we are called to do.” That includes building a summer curriculum for youth on black history to fill the week that is normally vacation Bible school, taking older youths on field trips to places like Birmingham to learn about that part of the civil rights struggle, welcoming fourth graders from all over the state as part of their Alabama history lesson. 

And then at Holt Street Baptist Church, we heard about the role in played in the bus boycott – “We were the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement,” retired pastor Rev. Willie D. McClung told us. And we heard about the backlash in the early 1970s when an anti-black state official designed new routes for interstates that surrounded and cut off the church from the neighborhood – and destroying much of the neighborhood in the process. But the church is now visible form one of those interstates, there is a large sign making its importance known and the new museum is becoming another destination on the Civil Rights Trail. 

The fight for a better tomorrow goes on.