Dr. Martin Luther King’s visits to Cambridge highlight evolution of the Civil Rights Movement
By Beth Folsom, 2025
On this Martin Luther King Day, we celebrate the work and legacy of King in the nonviolent pursuit of full civil rights and legal equality for Black Americans. But the goals, rhetoric and methods of the Civil Rights Movement were not static and, in fact, evolved considerably during the 1950s and ’60s in response to internal and external shifts. King’s three most significant public appearances in Cambridge – in 1954, 1960 and 1967 – illustrate King’s evolution as a preacher and activist, as well as the larger shifts in the movement’s ideology.
King’s early years were spent in Atlanta, where he attended Morehouse College, a historically Black institution that accepted him as a student at age 15 and awarded him a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948 at age 19 (that year he had been ordained as a Baptist minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father was the pastor). King went on to Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951, and came to Boston that fall to attend Boston University as a graduate student in theology.
During his graduate studies in Boston, King spent a good deal of time in Cambridge, taking philosophy classes at Harvard. King’s first major appearance as a preacher in Cambridge was his May 1954 visit to Union Baptist Church on Main Street, when he spoke at the annual memorial service of the Pullman Porters’ Benefit Association of Boston. The Pullman Porters derived their name from George Pullman, a white businessman in the post-Civil-War period who sought out formerly enslaved men to serve as porters in his railroad sleeping cars. The Pullman company employed Black men as Pullman porters for a full century from the late 1860s until the end of 1968, when it ceased operations (although some of its porters stayed on as employees of the railroad). Their duties included carrying luggage, shining shoes, serving food and catering to the varied needs of passengers on overnight trains.
Under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, the Pullman Porters had formed the first all-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925, and had long been instrumental in advocating for the rights and dignity of Black men working in the railroad hospitality industry. King himself had spent a summer as a college student working as a porter on a segregated railway, and understood firsthand the challenges these porters faced, even as they were employed in one of the very limited sectors that had helped to create the Black middle class in America. King’s remarks to the congregation in the spring of 1954, just before his graduation from the Boston University School of Theology, emphasized the need for fair treatment of the porters on the job, as well as the need for their continued economic and social supports after retirement.
King’s most famous appearance in Cambridge came several years later, in January 1960, when he spoke at First Baptist Church in Central Square. This time King was the sole headliner, advertised in the Cambridge newspapers as “a noted Southern Negro preacher,” “Negro integration leader” and “Alabama bus boycott leader.” Although there were a number of activists who participated in the boycott of the public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, from December 1955 to December 1956, including Rosa Parks and other women whose direct action and behind-the-scenes support made the boycott successful, it was King’s public face as a preacher and leader that drew national and international attention to their efforts.
King’s sermon at First Baptist focused largely on the principles of nonviolence and their importance to religious and secular movements for equal rights. King crafted his remarks in the form of an imaginary letter from St. Paul to Americans in the year 1960 (a concept that would have been very familiar to churchgoers at the time, as it was inspired by the New Testament letters of St. Paul to emerging churches in the early Christian period). King’s sermon urged listeners to see themselves not as members of a particular racial, ethnic or national group, but rather as Christians united in the quest for justice and peace using nonviolent means. He warned strongly against the use of violence, telling listeners “to be always sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons … As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love.” King’s appearance was exceedingly popular with Cambridge audiences, drawing a crowd of 2,000 inside the church and an additional 400 or more who listened to his sermon over the loudspeaker in the church vestry.
During the 1960s, King’s work as a preacher and activist took him across the country and around the world, and the changes of that decade had a profound effect on his understanding of the fight for racial justice and the ways in which the struggles of Black Americans were tied to those of other groups, both within America and abroad. By the time King came to Cambridge in the spring of 1967, the Vietnam War had been raging for more than a decade, with direct American involvement surging in the mid-1960s following the military coup and killing of president Ngô Đình Diệm. King and other civil rights leaders were particularly troubled by the draft system, which allowed many middle- and upper-class white men to gain exemptions for health reasons or because they were attending college – resources that many Black men and poor white men did not have access to, leading to a fighting force that was dramatically skewed toward these demographics. King also agreed with other advocates of racial justice that America’s treatment of its Black citizens at home did little to advance its cause on the world stage during a time when many saw the international scene as a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of those in countries around the world.
King’s 1967 appearance in Cambridge was part of a kickoff to what was known as Vietnam Summer, a national speaking and activism tour that aimed to put pressure on the U.S. government to pull out of Vietnam and leave the peninsula’s future to its own people. This movement had already received widespread support from the Cambridge community by the time of King’s visit, and by August 1967, the Cambridge Chronicle reported that an initiative to place a resolution on the upcoming city ballot opposing the war had 2,000 signatures with the expectation of several thousand more to come. King’s remarks that spring emphasized the intersections between the war abroad and racism at home, arguing that “the war in Vietnam has strengthened the forces of reaction in our country, and has excited violence and bigotry.” King’s experiences over the past two decades had solidified his conviction that the struggle of Black Americans was inextricably linked to the struggles of other marginalized peoples both at home and around the world, and that racial, political and economic justice were intertwined. The evolution of King’s thinking, and particularly his understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of justice movements, is further reflected in his interactions with a wide variety of Cantabrigians as he visited Cambridge neighborhoods after his 1967 speech, meeting with both warm welcomes and open hostility.
On Monday the City of Cambridge will honor King’s legacy with its Annual Martin Luther King Day Commemoration at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, followed by the 15th Annual Cambridge MLK Day of Service and Learning. The options for commemoration and action that Cambridge and other cities around the country offer on this day reflect a growing understanding of the complexities of King’s message and the interconnectedness of racial justice with other movements for equality and dignity throughout the country and the world.
This article originally appeared in Cambridge Day.
