Following the Footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Lynchburg

By Melissa Vandiver, Museum Experience Leader

“Dr. King shakes the hand of Chuck Moran at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg. Photo courtesy of Chuck Moran.”[1]

E. C. Glass High School. Lynchburg Museum System, gift of Mrs. R.P. Stickley.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Lynchburg on Tuesday, March 27, 1962, as part of his People-to-People Tour of the South that aimed at increasing voter registration among Black citizens. Dr. King made stops around southern Virginia and gave lectures to students and the public. Friend and fellow civil rights activist Reverend Virgil Wood of Lynchburg’s Diamond Hill Baptist Church helped coordinate Dr. King’s visit to the Hill City, as well as his 8:00 p.m. address at E.C. Glass High School.

Although his entire itinerary is unknown, we know that Dr. King went to The Lodge of the Fishermen on Boonsboro Road for brunch, The Mecca Restaurant on Bedford Avenue for dinner, Anne Spencer’s home on Pierce Street, E.C. Glass on Memorial Avenue for his speech, and finally, Dr. George F. Jackson’s home on Fifth Street. At some point during the day, Dr. King visited Diamond Hill Baptist Church and went door to door to encourage Black citizens to vote.

Dr. King’s dining at The Lodge of the Fishermen at Cosby Woods near Boonsboro Road was a natural decision. As a center for civil rights activism in Lynchburg, the lunch spot was the only integrated eating space other than the Lynchburg General Hospital cafeteria. Originally a nature park, in 1954 Rev. Bev Cosby opened the first explicitly integrated church in Lynchburg, the Church of the Covenant, on what is now the Cosby Woods property. In 1960 Lynchburg College student George Brumback helped organize the sit-in at Lynchburg’s Patterson’s Drug Store at Cosby Woods. After the integrated group was ejected from Patterson’s, the Lodge of the Fishermen opened at Cosby Woods as a racially integrated coffee house “where genuine conversation and dialog could take place.” Soon after the City of Lynchburg closed its public pools to avoid integration in July 1961, Camp Kum-Ba-Yah at Cosby Woods welcomed Black families to its pools. Some people from Cosby Woods even participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches, a series of protests in Alabama for voting rights in March 1965.

The Mecca Restaurant. Lynchburg Museum System, gift of Ann M. Mitchell.

Later on in the evening of March 27, 1962, Dr. King ate at The Mecca Restaurant on Bedford Avenue, a Black-owned restaurant with a soda fountain and juke box. Built in 1936, The Mecca was owned and operated in the early 1940s by Edward F. Mitchell, Sr., and later by his son and daughter-in-law, Elton Wayland Mitchell, Sr., and Aurelia. This restaurant advertised in the Green Books of the time, which were guides for Black travelers that marked safe places throughout the South to avoid areas of increased racial violence. Originally, The Mecca had a beer garden at the back of the building; the area was later enclosed to create a large hall for dinner and dancing. The Mecca finally closed in 1968, and today the site is home to the Fellowship Church of Christ in a renovated building.

Interior of The Mecca Restaurant with a jukebox. Lynchburg Museum System, gift of Ann M. Mitchell.

After dinner, Dr. King visited Anne Spencer’s home on Pierce Street. Anne Spencer was a poet, civil rights activist, teacher, librarian, wife and mother, and gardener whose home was a center for Harlem Renaissance figures' visits to Lynchburg. Spencer helped establish the Lynchburg branch of the NAACP decades earlier, and supplemented the library at Lynchburg’s all-Black Dunbar High School with her own books. In a recent program put on by the MLK Lynchburg Community Council, Shaun Spencer-Hester, Anne Spencer’s granddaughter, recalled the story of Dr. King’s visit on his way to E.C. Glass: they spoke about Dr. King’s father, whom Spencer knew, about activism, civil rights, religion, and their similarities and differences.

Diamond Hill Baptist Church. Lynchburg Museum System, gift of Pamela Smith-Johnson and David A. Smith.

At some point during the day, Dr. King visited the Diamond Hill Baptist Church and went knocking door-to-door to encourage voter registration in what The News called “the city’s Negro section” (we have no concrete evidence of what homes or what neighborhoods were visited).

After his visit with Anne Spencer, Dr. King went on to E. C. Glass High School for his speech. The Lynchburg branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) helped arrange this appearance, and Dr. King was joined that evening by Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, executive secretary of the association, Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, director of Citizenship Training Schools, and Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, treasurer of SCLC. Dr. King’s speech characteristically focused on non-violent tactics, describing them as “a morale weakener,” noting that violence is immoral and impractical. He said that going to the polls is an easy and important step towards change. Dr. King emphasized that “the time is always right to do right. We must use time creatively. Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me. Time is neutral, it can be used constructively or destructively. We must help time. So far it has been the segregators who have been making the best use of their time…”

He encouraged the crowd to continue to go to court over segregation.

Dr. King emphasized that people must not back down in the face of platitudes from the government, and that we must continue to call for action rather than words. In the MLK Lynchburg Community Council’s program commemorating the 60th anniversary of Dr. King’s visit, Mayor MaryJane Dolan noted,

 “We must also be reminded the struggle for civil rights is as real today as it was in 1962 and there is still much to be done to ensure the rights of all people… each of us should be committed to do the work of social justice, which the commitment is celebrating but also committing to advance the principles of equality, dignity, and humanity.” (January 17, 2022)

Dr. George F. Jackson’s home, now owned by the neighboring church. https://mapviewer.lynchburgva.gov/ParcelViewer/

Rounding off the evening, Dr. King went to the home of Dr. George F. Jackson, a dentist, at 1005 Fifth Street (a property now owned by the neighboring Fifth Street Baptist Church) for a late evening snack and to spend the night. Owen Cardwell, who along with Lynda Woodruff enrolled and integrated E.C. Glass less than two months before, was there. Though Cardwell noted a sense of melancholy from Dr. King, he recalled the group singing freedom songs at the end of the night.

After a busy day in Lynchburg, Dr. King rose early the next morning to travel to Farmville in Prince Edward County to continue his tour across Virginia.

View this map to track his footsteps on his 1962 visit. The highlighted neighborhoods were selected from combined data from the 2010 US Census tracts in the city of Lynchburg [4, 6, 7, 11, & 19] and the 1937 Lynchburg Redlining Maps. These neighborhoods were rated C or D, and today are Black-majority neighborhoods. Neighborhoods labeled D were lined in red meaning “hazardous for lenders,” and neighborhoods labeled C would have had one or more black families present. House loan lenders would avoid lending money to people in C and D neighborhoods, leading to a lack of equity and generational wealth that affects many Black citizens to this day.

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[1] http://mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov/kinginvirginia/southside.html

 

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