8 things you probably didn’t know about Martin Luther King Jr. - Salon.com
When King was 15, and again when he was 18, he worked summers
harvesting tobacco in Simsbury, Connecticut, not far from Hartford. His
experience as a middle-class son of a prominent black family from
Atlanta’s prosperous “Sweet” Auburn Avenue performing menial labor in
Yankee territory helped shape his future. “On our way here we saw some
things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in
astonishment. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at
all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to
and sit anywhere we want to.” In a correspondence to his mother, he
continued the theme, “I never thought that a person of my race could eat
anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And
we went to the largest shows there.”
The teenage King was equally
moved that there were racially integrated church services in Simsbury.
More than a decade later he would famously say, “It is appalling that
the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on
Sunday morning.” The fact that King could not enjoy such freedoms in
most of his native Deep South inspired him to become a man of the cloth.
When King applied to Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, he stated
that after a second summer exposure to Northern racial tolerance, “I
felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of
responsibility which I could not escape.”
When King was 15, and again when he was 18, he worked summers
harvesting tobacco in Simsbury, Connecticut, not far from Hartford. His
experience as a middle-class son of a prominent black family from
Atlanta’s prosperous “Sweet” Auburn Avenue performing menial labor in
Yankee territory helped shape his future. “On our way here we saw some
things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in
astonishment. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at
all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to
and sit anywhere we want to.” In a correspondence to his mother, he
continued the theme, “I never thought that a person of my race could eat
anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And
we went to the largest shows there.”
The teenage King was equally
moved that there were racially integrated church services in Simsbury.
More than a decade later he would famously say, “It is appalling that
the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on
Sunday morning.” The fact that King could not enjoy such freedoms in
most of his native Deep South inspired him to become a man of the cloth.
When King applied to Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, he stated
that after a second summer exposure to Northern racial tolerance, “I
felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of
responsibility which I could not escape.”
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