King hit the city’s streets to rally voters By the spring of 1962, the civil rights campaign in Virginia had reached its climax. “We were in the midst of our struggle,” remembers the Rev. Milton A. Reid, who was president of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the time. One of the main goals of the movement was to elect an African-American from the Fourth Congressional District to Congress by 1964 — which wasn’t easy, because the majority of black voters weren’t even registered. In March 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to come back to Petersburg for the fourth time to help register voters. He set aside three days for this trip and prepared to visit a number of locations in the Tri-Cities. King landed at Byrd Field, Richmond’s airport, on the morning of March 27. With him were the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, former pastor at Gillfield Baptist Church and now executive director of the SCLC and King’s chief of staff, and former Petersburg resident Dorothy Cotton, the only female on King’s executive staff. Reid was to lead the delegation. After a brief press conference, King’s convoy of cars drove to Petersburg, where it arrived at noon. “It was an awkward appearance,” remembers Herbert Coulton, local field director of the SCLC, who picked up King from the airport. “Whenever he came to visit, King would travel in a limousine from a local funeral home.” King and his staff met the Rev. R.G. Williams for lunch at Zion Baptist Church, where Williams was pastoring. They were joined by Hermanze E. Fauntleroy and David Gunter, leaders of the Petersburg Improvement Association. “Dr. King suggested that we should go door to door after lunch to register voters and convince people to pay their poll taxes,” Coulton said. Paying poll taxes was crucial at the time — without that payment, there was no permission to vote. Many poor African-Americans couldn’t afford the tax. King asked Coulton to suggest a local neighborhood for the voter registration walk. “I am originally from Blandford, so I didn’t have to think about it,” Coulton said. The delegation left the church at around 2 p.m. and drove to Blandford. They parked their cars on East Wythe Street and began walking a route that Coulton had mapped out. “We knocked on doors at some houses on Wythe, then we went down South Old Church Street, a small portion of North Old Church Street, Foley Street, Burch Street,” Coulton said. “We probably covered a block of each street that we went to, knocking on about 50 doors in two hours.” Many Blandford residents were in disbelief when they found King standing in their doorstep. “People were very surprised and delighted, they couldn’t believe it,” Coulton said. “It all was spontaneous, women had their aprons on, men worked in the yard. There was no fanfare about it.” Walker has similar recollections. “People were impressed that a man of Dr. King’s fame would come to Petersburg, which was considered a backwater city,” he said. “And they were impressed that he picked someone from that city to lead his organization.” One of the local movement members who walked with King that day was Thelma Bethea. “Most of the people were really excited about Dr. King knocking at their doors,” she said. Bethea remembers that the registration walk was quite a success. “We got a lot of new voters that day, and people in Dr. King’s staff would take them to the registrar’s office right away,” she said. “We also had lists of registered voters and found out that some had the names of deceased white folks on them, but someone had voted under their names. I think that’s how we lost many elections.” Bethea noticed that the atmosphere in the streets of Blandford was overwhelming that day. “There was more togetherness than I have ever seen in my life,” she said. “There was no hostility, no violence and almost nobody rejected us.” After the walk, King told the media that “there are 100,000 unregistered Negro voters in the district and only 17,000 are registered.” He added that he hoped that this number would be tripled by 1964. Around 4 p.m., King’s delegation left for Lynchburg, where King did another people-to-people tour and spoke at E.C. Glass High School. King returned to Petersburg in the evening and, once again, spent the night at the home of Josephine Walker-Jones on 514 Harrison St., where he had stayed before on his previous visit in 1960. The next morning, March 28, King rose early and took his staff on a trip through Dinwiddie, Prince George and Chesterfield counties. What locations he visited is not clear, but local movement member Thelma Bethea said that she remembers King and his delegation also marching through Colonial Heights. At noon, King arrived at Virginia State College to speak to about 1,000 students at Virginia Hall. The theme of the speech was “Sleeping through a revolution,” which struck King’s staff member Dorothy Cotton as quite ironic. “It was a slow speech that day,” she said. “Martin seemed tired, which is not surprising, because we had traveled so much.” Cotton sat in the audience, listening to King. Her husband George, who had decided to stay behind in Petersburg when she joined King in Atlanta, sat next to her. “I felt like a visitor in my former hometown,” she said. Cotton also remembers the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker complain that King’s speech wasn’t effective at all. “After the speech, I heard him say ‘That was awful,’” she said. In the evening, King was the main guest-speaker at the Eastern Virginia Mass Meeting of the Virginia State Unit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The meeting began at 8 p.m. at the First Baptist Church on 236 Harrison St., the church of Dr. Milton A. Reid. The event was co-sponsored by the Petersburg Improvement Association and the Hopewell Improvement Association. “It was a church full of people, I can tell you that,” Walker said. “We won a lot of supporters around that time.” The Goodwill Community Singers and the Goodwill Chorus performed before King spoke, and besides King, among the guest speakers were the Rev. Grady W. Powell, Walker’s successor at Gillfield Baptist Church, the Rev. Curtis Harris from Hopewell, Herbert Coulton, Dorothy Cotton, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy — future King successor — and Walker. The meeting closed with a rendition of the Black National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” On his third day in the Tri-Cities that year, on March 29, King traveled to Hopewell to support Curtis Harris during his trial at the Circuit Court. According to a report from The Progress-Index from that day, “Harris faced a contempt charge, which grew out of his refusal to answer questions put to him while under oath before a state legislative committee” in the fall of 1961. The charge had been placed by the Boatwright Committee. Before going to court, King visited the local snack bar, called “Harris Snack Bar,” on 208-B Terminal St. in Hopewell, which Harris owned. “People were coming from everywhere, because they had heard that Dr. King was in Hopewell,” Harris said. Harris’s wife, Ruth, remembered how King walked into her snack bar. “He asked me for a glass of water,” she said. “But I never got it for him, I was that excited about having him in our snack bar. Eventually, somebody else got him the water.” King had something to eat, then he joined Harris on his way to court. The snack bar still stands today — Harris has his office in the room, which he never renovated since King set foot in it. The trial was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., but by 11:30 a.m., Judge Carlton E. Holladay was still in a private meeting with prosecutors and Len W. Holt, one of the four attorneys representing Harris, to hear a number of pre-trial motions. Walker remembers waiting in the courtroom with King. “Curtis Harris was a member of the National Board of the SCLC at the time,” Walker said. “He lead the Hopewell Improvement Organization, and he was to Hopewell what I was to Petersburg. We were Dr. King’s men in Virginia. This explains Dr. King’s support for Curtis.” Harris ended up not having a trial that day. Upon leaving the courtroom, King said that he would back Harris “all the way,” if he was convicted. “There is no basis for this charge,” he told a reporter from The Progress-Index. “In my opinion, the committee as a whole is unnecessary and contrary to the First Amendment.” King predicted that in case of a conviction, “it would be reversed once the case reaches the federal courts.” King and his staff got in their cars and left the city to head to the airport. “This was the only time he was in Hopewell,” Harris said. Before boarding a plane to Wisconsin at Byrd Field, King told reporters that his trip to the Tri-Cities had been “most beneficial.” He estimated that “at least 10,000 persons were contacted by me” during his visit. He added that several hundred said that they would serve in his non-violent movement “to obtain full integration in this area. Many joined our non-violent army.” And more volunteers would follow, because on his next visits to Petersburg, King would influence world policy and manifest his status as human rights leader.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:37:03 +0000
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