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Martin Luther King Jr.’s name and image are all over Baton Rouge, from brightly colored murals to buildings such as Martin Luther King Jr. on Gus Young Street Dr. Community Center.
But what kind of connection did King have to Baton Rouge during his lifetime? Although he was not a regular visitor to the city, the connections he had had played a vital role in his civil rights career.
King’s first visit to Baton Rouge was likely in the early 1950s, when he visited Southern University on a lecture tour. Although he was not widely known at the time, he was already making waves in the African-American church community.
The LSU Library has a collection of historical recordings highlighting King’s early encounters with Baton Rouge, many of which were brought together in the 2010 T. Harry Williams Oral History Podcast. In a 2006 interview, the late Huel Perkins — who had deep ties to Southern University, including serving as dean of the school’s College of Arts and Humanities from 1968 to 1978 — remembered one of King’s early visits.
The Rev. TJ Jemison accompanied Mary Briscoe (left) and Sandra Ann Jones, two of nine Southern University students who were released on bail after being jailed in 1960 for participating in a sit-in against a segregated lunch counter.
“We have what’s called a Vespers series, which is a lecture series,” Perkins told interviewers Petra Hendry and Dorian McCoy. “He’s going to come and talk to us. We didn’t know he was going to be so famous. But we got a chance to meet him.”
Not long after, King delivered his “Three Dimensions of a Whole Life” lecture in the South. The visit took place on October 16, 1955, during a busy time for the young pastor. Just six weeks later, he was embroiled in one of the most significant civil rights protests in American history: the Montgomery bus boycott.
While the boycott ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, it wasn’t the first large-scale bus boycott in the United States.
That distinction belongs to Baton Rouge, which saw a bus boycott two years earlier in 1953. Unsurprisingly, it was here that King turned his attention when he became a major figure in the Montgomery operation.
On June 14, 2018, the campus of Southern University. Martin Luther King Jr. went on a school lecture tour when he was young.
The Baton Rouge boycott was spearheaded by Pastor TJ Jamison, a native of Selma, Alabama, who came to Baton Rouge in June 1949 to become pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church.
While it is possible that King contacted Jamison and other Baton Rouge protest leaders several times, two events loom large: a call to Jamison shortly after the Montgomery protests began in 1955 and a visit to Baton the following year Rouge.
They got the initial call when Operation Montgomery had been going on for three days. According to Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Research and Education, King wrote in his memoir that Jamison’s “detailed account of the Baton Rouge experience was invaluable.”
Later, as the boycott unfolded, King traveled to Louisiana for a more in-depth personal visit. Among the civil rights leaders and organizers he met with—including Johnny Jones, Raymond Scott, and Jamison—was Dupe Anderson.
Years later, in a 1994 interview with Maxine Crump, Anderson recalled that King focused on the community aspect of the Baton Rouge protests.
Pastor TJ Jemison joined, and his congregation filled First Baptist Church of Mount Zion with song. From July 15, 1984, in the Sunday Advocate. Photo by John H. Williams.
“The most important thing he wanted to know was how we could get the community to come together and support us,” Anderson recalled.
“To attract merchants, gas stations, etc. Black businesses. To get their support. I think Martin Luther’s plan was that they would boycott no matter what. But he knew they needed the full support of the black community for a bus boycott.”
In terms of boycott time, Montgomery has 13 months longer than Baton Rouge instead of 8 days. But the technicalities of the two operations are similar, and in some respects, so are the legal complexities. Baton Rouge gave King clues on how to continue protesting.
The Baton Rouge boycott ended in compromise. According to Dean Sinclair’s article Equal in All Places: The Civil Rights Strugle in Baton Rouge, 1953-1963, the city passed an ordinance reserving the first two seats on buses for white passengers and the last seat for black passengers , Passengers are free to ride and sit anywhere they like.
Martin Luther King Jr. waves to crowds in Washington, March 1963.
This led to dissatisfaction with any form of segregation on buses, and it took another nine years for segregation on Baton Rouge buses to be fully abolished.
In his interview, Anderson told Crump he didn’t know King responded to the compromise. However, he said, that doesn’t mean it didn’t influence Kim’s decision-making.
“I think that’s why he was successful,” Anderson said. “He learned from it. he learned from. You know, we could have done the same thing in this community. We started a lot of things…in Baton Rouge, but we didn’t finish (they) finish. “
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