The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the mid-1950s history changing event that catapulted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence, lasted 38 days.
A frequently overlooked fact about King is that the birthplace of his legendary civil rights activism was not Montgomery, Alabama but Maple Shade, New Jersey––a small town about 13 miles outside of Philadelphia where King staged his first formal protest against racial discrimination.
That protest inside a Maple Shade café where the owner used a gun to drive King and three companions from the premises also produced the first lawsuit King filed against discrimination. That owner refused to serve King and his companions.
Today, a baffling facet about the vibrant legacy of the internationally acclaimed King is the fact that some authorities in New Jersey have failed to either approve or reject a request for historic designation of the place where evidence indicates King plotted that June 1950 Maple Shade protest.
That delay-fraught approval process by New Jersey’s Historic Preservation Office (HPO) has so far lasted over 1,770-days: nearly five times longer than the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
HPO is the entity that places properties and persons on the New Jersey state Historic Registry. HPO reviews for Registry placement usually take 90 days or less.
In March 2015 New Jersey researcher Patrick Duff filed an application with HPO for Registry placement of 753 Walnut Street in Camden, N.J., the house where King plotted the Maple Shade protest while he attended a seminary in a city outside of Philadelphia.
Duff discovered the significance of that Walnut Street property while researching the 1950 Maple Shade incident. Relatives of King’s seminary colleague and close friend Walter McCall––who was with King during that Maple Shade protest––owned that Walnut Street property. King stayed at the Walnut Street home occasionally when he visited with McCall who lived in 753 with his relatives.
Duff uncovered old newspaper articles where the then owner of 753 and his family members recounted their conversations with King about that protest including a spirited discussion at that house hours before the Maple Shade protest.
King listed 753 Walnut Street as his address on police reports that involved the protest.
Aggravating this baffling delay is the fact that HPO’s all-white top decision-makers have discounted and/or dismissed an array of extraordinary New Jersey-centric elements connected to King’s first protest and first lawsuit.
That lawsuit from King’s first protest rested on a 1945 New Jersey anti-discrimination law: the first ever statewide civil rights enforcement statute approved in the United States.
A man who played a prominent role in the passage of that 1945 law was Dr. Ulysses Wiggins, a physician in Camden who headed both the Camden city and New Jersey state NAACP. Wiggins went to help King and his companions, in the middle of the night, hours after the Maple Shade protest.
The Camden NAACP branch attorney, Robert Burke Johnson, prepared the lawsuit King filed. Johnson, a University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate, was one of New Jersey’s first Black prosecutors and judge. (Johnson successfully used that 1945 law to reverse the convictions of four Black men arrested for a sit-in at another Camden County restaurant before his engagement with King.)
In 2016 the HPO rebuffed requests to place 753 on its registry from Camden’s mayor, its Congressman and a resolution calling for placement from the entire New Jersey State Legislature.
Ignoring these requests, the HPO embarked on a truly unprecedented action when it commissioned a $20,000 study to determine the historic validity of King’s presence at the 753 house. The HPO never required a formal study for any of the other 51,000-plus items then on NJ’s Historic Registry inclusive of nearly 100 Registry listings in the city
of Camden.
That study conducted by an all-white research team from Stockton University concluded that King did not officially “live” at 753 Walnut, a point not in dispute by King, the persons who lived in 753 and award-winning biographers of King.
That study also declared that King’s Maple Shade protest and subsequent lawsuit were not pivotal in the development of King’s activism. That conclusion contradicts King’s statements that cited the Maple Shade incident as an impetus for his activism and the findings of other researchers.
A spokesman for HPO, in early January 2020, said the office is still “preparing a response to the application and will provide a response once it has been issued.” That spokesman said there is no “timeline” on when Duff’s application will be approved or rejected.
HPO’s stall-stance is a throwback to a dark underside in New Jersey, the last northern state to outlaw slavery that experienced its last reported lynching in 1886. New Jersey’s Democratic governor and its lieutenant governor (an African American woman) have remained silent on HPO’s stance related to King.
Researcher Patrick Duff, who filed that 2015 application for recognition of 753 Walnut Street, said, “African American history doesn’t seem important to certain people.”
Linn Washington Jr. is a journalist and journalism professor who has researched and written about Dr. King’s activities in the Philadelphia area since the mid-1980s.
