King’s Houston legacy a resolve for change
Civic leaders who worked with the civil rights titan hoped his slaying wouldn’t shatter city’s progress
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his message of inclusion to Houston for the last time in October 1967.
More than 4,000 people packed into the Sam Houston Coliseum for a fundraiser that also featured concerts by Harry Belafonte and Aretha Franklin.
Ku Klux Klansmen distributed hate tracts outside, and stink bombs planted inside the arena sent many in the crowd to the exits.
King continued his address despite the disturbances.
“We are going to build right here a nation where men and women, black and white, Jew and gentile, Protestant and Catholic, will stand together and sing the words of that old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last,’ ” he pronounced.
By April 4, 1968, King had been slain by an assassin’s bullet.
It was a moment in the nation’s history —and in Houston’s — that shocked the local community, leaving a mood of somber bewilderment and resolve for the city to continue its unique legacy of calm, progressive advancement.
“We had lost a Jesus like figure and we didn’t have another one,” recalled the Rev. William A. Lawson, the founding pastor of Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church and a fellow black clergyman who collaborated personally with King’s
“Houston desegregated in one day.” The Rev. William A. Lawson, founding pastor, Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church
nonviolent struggle and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The shooting at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis set off rebellion in large urban areas across the country, but not Houston. The city by then already had largely avoided that kind of violence by desegregating its public facilities with stealth precision.
“People were depressed. How could this take place?” said Jack Segal, who was an associate rabbi for Congregation Beth Yeshurun in 1968. “Martin Luther King … was interested in all people in this world, regardless of color, creed or religion — and somebody took his life. What a terrible thing that was.”
Sit-ins, desegregation
Social change in Houston emerged through a collaboration of the white business elite and an array of faith leaders.
Sit-in demonstrations by Texas Southern University students in March 1960 led to secret negotiations among business, political and religious leaders. The result was the quiet desegregation of Houston businesses that August that was strategically and intentionally unreported in local media, including television stations, the Houston Post and Houston Chronicle. National publications and programs missed the major story.
“Houston desegregated in one day,” Lawson said recently. “That was largely because we were able to pull the business and the religious community together and to decide that we were going to do it that day without media attention. … When black people went into Foley’s, they were welcomed into a store that had not welcomed them before. They didn’t see the white and colored signs anymore.”
The smooth transition allowed Houston to avoid the burning buildings and civil unrest that marked other cities.
By the time King delivered his iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech” on the National Mall in Washington and celebrated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he had turned his attention to voting rights.
That battle coincided with a rising younger generation of activists who wanted quicker and bolder action. Plus, there was a clandestine effort to discredit King.
“The head of the FBI at that time, J. Edgar Hoover, was calling him a communist, and I think a lot of people fell for that and didn’t want to get too involved in the movement Dr. King was leading,” said the Rev. Bill Kerley, now 80, a white minister who worked with Lawson in the 1960s on racial reconciliation.
By the middle of the decade, many people involved in the movement were lethargic and skeptical about the concept of nonviolence, Lawson said.
“The nonviolent movement was being opposed by Black Power, and I think that people were saying, ‘We’re not going to take this brutality anymore. We’re going to fight back,’” he said.
Calm city came to a halt
Impatience in Memphis in March 1968 derailed a march in support of economic justice for the city’s sanitation workers.
When King returned the next month, he preached his last sermon — “I’ve been to the mountaintop” — and was shot dead the next day on the balcony of the Lorraine.
Kerley, who preached a dialogue sermon with Lawson the year before called “The Salt and Pepper of the Earth,” described the mood in Houston after the 1968 shooting as “stunned and shocked and grief-stricken.”
Houston Mayor Louie Welch urged calm that wouldn’t “upset the racial progress and understanding we are achieving here,” according to the Chronicle’s front page. “America has seen again the futility of violence.”
The next day, the Chronicle reported just two local incidents: A Molotov cocktail thrown into a furniture store and a white motorist who said his car was hit by a rock pitched by a group of young black men.
Welch declared a day of prayer the following Sunday, three days later. That afternoon after church services, about 2,000 people of various faiths and races silently marched 36 blocks from a black United Methodist Church in Third Ward to City Hall for a memorial ceremony.
On Tuesday, the day of King’s funeral, TSU, the University of Houston and area schools were closed, and many people attended special memorial services.
Longshoremen took the day off and shut down the Port of Houston. There was no city garbage collection. Major League Baseball openers on Monday and Tuesday that week were rescheduled nationwide. The New York Stock Exchange was stilled. Even roulette wheels in Nevada stopped spinning for two hours.
The Houston Forward Times ,a black weekly newspaper founded in 1960 and still distributed across Southeast Texas, ran stories about King’s Memphis campaign in its April 6, 1968, edition. The paper published an eight-page special section in its April 13, 1968, edition about King’s legacy, his visits to the Bayou City and local reaction to his death.
Despite King’s largely ecumenical elevation and acceptance today by people of all backgrounds, he was not roundly welcomed in Houston during his five visits to the city. He was shunned by many established black pastors and congregations but was hosted by then-young pastors including Lawson and the Rev. F.N. Williams.
In that final trip to Houston in October 1967, King — by then a Nobel Prize laureate — had shifted his message to criticism of the Vietnam War and poverty. His sharply focused economic agenda drove his Poor People’s Campaign and the decision to support the striking Memphis sanitation workers.
‘Work is not done’
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, is speaking in Memphis on Wednesday with former Attorney General Eric Holder and national labor leaders about King’s Memphis campaign to support the professional dignity of working people by advocating for pay raises and safety measures on the job.
While in college shortly after King’s death, Jackson Lee, who is black, worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to register voters in Southern states.
“His work is not done,” she said. “In 2018, we are fighting for a criminal justice system that works, an educational system that works for all children and an economic system that lifts the opportunities of all families across the nation.”
In 1968, Catholic Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Fiorenza was a parish priest at Houston’s Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral. He joined King for one of the derailed Selma-to-Montgomery marches in Alabama and still believes there’s much more to do a half-century after the leader’s death.
“If we are going to be faithful to the movement and to Martin Luther King, we have to know it’s not just segregation, it’s not just the right to vote — it’s the economy, which has forced poverty on so many people,” said the 87-year-old, who is white. “A city as wealthy as Houston still has a long ways to go.
“We’ve made a lot of good progress, of course, but there’s a lot left to be done. We don’t hear our leaders speaking about the poverty that still exists and the necessity to do what we can to ensure that people have good-paying jobs sufficient enough to take care of their families in a good and decent way.”
At the time of King’s death, Lawson commented that the killing marked “the end of an
era.” But the local luminary, who turns 90 this summer, said many of the issues that troubled Houston and America 50 years ago remain — particularly hatred, violence and gunfire, all of which ended King’s life.
‘Long way to go’
“Most of all, I would like very much to see our legislators more concerned about what is happening with our young people. I think about the young people who are protesting and the number of youngsters who have been killed by police all over our nation,” Lawson said. “With Dr. King’s teaching on nonviolence, I wish we could move faster on gun legislation.”
Segal, who was the senior rabbi of his congregation for three decades and is now retired, said King’s legacy influenced local racial progress.
“Because of him, times are much better,” the 88-year-old said. “We still have racism. We still have anti-Semitism. We still have a long way to go, but the path is not as long as it was in 1968.”