House of a King: Alabama Parsonage Becomes Museum, The

Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2004 by Berkhalter, Denise L

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Fifty years ago, a young Martin Luther King Jr. mounted the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before a congregation of nearly 300 of Montgomery, Ala.'s prominent Blacks.

At 25, he had not yet earned his doctorate or led a church as senior pastor. He was nervous. It was Jan. 24, 1954, the Sunday of his trial sermon at the church led just two years before by fiery civil rights pioneer the Rev. Vernon Johns.

His dynamic sermon on the "complete life" moved the church at the foot of Alabama's capitol. The $4,200 annual salary, two-bedroom parsonage near the Black-elite haven of Centennial Hill and the members of segregated Montgomery's second African American church were his.

That memory of King and his life at 309 South Jackson Street with his wife, Coretta, and their two small children, Yolanda and Martin III, are part of a rarely told story. It is history now recounted at the Dexter Parsonage Museum dedicated in February by the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Foundation Inc.

After lying derelict for a decade, $450,000 in federal, state, city and church-raised funds were injected into the 2,000 square-foot parsonage that opened for tours last November and is expected to welcome 5,000 visitors per year.

Built in 1912 and purchased by Dexter for its ministers' use in 1920, the house joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Twelve of Dexter's pastors, including Johns, lived in the wood frame house from 1920 until it closed in 1992.

"This was Dr. King's residence from 1954 to 1960, an aspect of his life that has not been memorialized," says Thomas McPherson, the foundation's vice president. "We want people to know that Dr. King was a human being who had an humble beginning as a pastor of a small congregation in Montgomery. He I lived there as a pastor would live."

Renovations of the parsonage and construction of the interpretive center are the first steps in a multiphase $13.5-million plan that includes restoring the 115-year-old renamed Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church as well as erecting a historical museum and education center.

It is all very exciting to Maggie Stringer, a volunteer tour guide at the parsonage. The 68-year-old boarded with the church secretary of Dexter from 1953 to 1955 as a young student at historically Black Alabama State University.

As much as she recalls King's dynamic voice and his work alongside Montgomery ministers that brought bus segregation to its knees, she remembers just as fondly the chatter about the young Atlanta man looking for a church.

"Deacons visited Rev. King in Atlanta. he (had) just finished college and gotten married. When it was decided he would come for a trial sermon, the buzz was whether he would be called to preach at Dexter," says Stringer.

His calling grew beyond counseling his flock. King became president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and led the 1955-1956 boycott of Montgomery's segregated bus system after a Black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a White man.

His life at South Jackson Street became dangerous. Threatening phone calls were the worst of it until Jan. 30, 1956. Coretta and a church member were sitting in the front parlor when they heard a loud noise. The parsonage had been bombed. They safely moved to the back of the house. Ironically, King's muse, Ghandi, had been assassinated on the same day eight years earlier.

King was speaking at a local church when he was told of the blast and came home to find one of four front-porch columns damaged, a pair of windows shattered and a shallow hole on the right side of the porch where the bomb hit. Today, visitors pay $3, children younger than 12 just a dollar less, to walk past the bomb's imprint.

Inside the parsonage, tourists get a glimpse into how the Kings lived before the movement. The simple house contains hardwood floors, a tiled bathroom, and the small piano where Coretta, a concert pianist, would play and sing.

Behind pocket doors, the formal dining room table sits near one of three fireplaces. It is a reminder of strategy sessions on the Montgomery Boycott and unrest in Selma, Ala., with leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the NAACP.

In the kitchen is a cupboard full of 1950s and '60s staples - flour, sugar, canned goods - a folded Montgomery Advertiser newspaper rests on the table, a nostalgic Frigidaire, a round basin washer and a clear view of the rebuilt back porch with white-collar shirts on a laundry line.

In the living room, where a faded sofa is flanked by side tables and a pair of lamps, tourism manager and longtime Dexter church member Avis Dunbar speaks excitedly of teas and social gatherings at the parsonage.

Just past the master bedroom with its full bed covered with an off-white ehenille spread, bedside crib and dressing bureau, is King's study. It's hard to imagine it as the intellectual haven of a civil rights icon, advocate of nonviolence and Nobel Peace Prize-winner celebrated nationally each January.

The small room full of books, records and papers is too unassuming. A white ribbon-trimmed hat hangs from a coat rack. A turntable is an arm's reach from the wooden chair pulled up to a narrow table topped with a desk lamp, cigarettes and the workings of a man studying for his Ph.D. and mulling over sermons and speeches.