Keeping The Message Alive

60 Years This Month: Witnesses Recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Unwavering Eloquence During His 1964 Visit To Park Hill

By Cara DeGette

GPHN Editor

When Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Park Hill 60 years ago this month, he mesmerized and energized thousands of Coloradans working toward integration and waging a battle for racial equality.

The same month — January, 1964 — Time magazine named King its “Man of the Year” for his influence the year before. He was the first African American recipient of that honor. He had just celebrated his 35th birthday.

King’s three-day visit to Colorado included several speaking engagements in Denver and Littleton. Denver paid him a total of $200 for the appearances, which sparked some controversy.

The historic tour also included a powerful Sunday sermon that King delivered at Macedonia Baptist Church, a predominantly Black church in the Skyland neighborhood north of City Park. King completed his time in Denver with another sermon at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Park Hill, where the crowd, in the thousands, spilled onto the street outside.

Everywhere, King spoke of the battle for racial equality, promoting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed later that year.

“More and more we must come to see, we must come to see, that the problem of racial injustice is a national problem and not a sectional one,” King said in one Denver speech, as reported in newspaper accounts at the time.

“… No section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. And I think as the movement progresses in the south it must progress in the north and vice versa because if you have the problem anywhere you have some aspects of it everywhere. And injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Park Hill relevance

According to an account in the Jan. 25, 1964 Rocky Mountain News, King hinted at a national boycott of industries that refuse to abandon employment policies that allow racial discrimination. He rejected suggestions that enacting new laws would not change attitudes that condone discrimination.

“Legislation can’t make a man love me, but it can stop a man from lynching me,” King told an audience of 600 on a Friday night at the University of Denver.

King’s visit was sponsored by the Denver Commission on Human Relations. The organization’s chairman, Dick Young, escorted the civil rights leader to his many speaking engagements and meetings with other local leaders in Denver and Littleton.

“I was just awestruck at how he spoke, using no notes,” recalled Young, who has lived in Park Hill with his wife Lorie for 63 years.

“He was just such an effective speaker.”

Park Hill was particularly relevant to King’s visit because the neighborhood was ground zero in the fight for fair housing and public school integration during the time.

Park Hill was the first neighborhood in Denver — and was a model for the nation — to resist the blockbusting that occurred when Black families started moving into neighborhoods that had been previously been inhabited mostly by white families. Rather than go along with what is also called “white flight,” many Park Hill residents worked to integrate the neighborhood.

One of King’s visits was to Littleton, which was then a far south suburb of Denver where very few, if any, Blacks lived at the time.  In a 2006 PBS documentary about King’s trip to Denver, Garrett Ray, the former editor of the Littleton Independent, discussed the significance.

“[We knew] Park Hill was making efforts to remain as an integrated community, and Littleton [leaders] said, ‘We need to be looking at this and we need to be ready’,” said Ray.

‘Just a beautiful time’

On Jan. 24, 1964, King addressed the congregation at Littleton’s Grace Presbyterian Church.

“We’re struggling in the final analysis to save the soul of our nation,” he said. “We’re struggling also to save the image of our nation. Therefore it is imperative for the nation to work passionately and unrelentingly now to get rid of this cancer of segregation and discrimination.”

The visit also included a reception for King at the Youngs’ Park Hill home, with then-Mayor Tom Currigan and other dignitaries.

Lorie Young said that it was a fully catered affair, but all King asked for was a cup of tea with lemon.  And she had no lemon in the house, so had to run next door and borrow one from a neighbor. King’s trip came less than two months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and many were still in shock. Security was tight throughout the visit, the Youngs said.

In a retrospective piece that ran in the Greater Park Hill News 10 years ago, Maxine Gatewood recalled the excitement of King’s Jan. 25 appearance at Macedonia Baptist Church. “We had read about him and seen him on TV and witnessed him in the light of all the stuff that was going on at that time,” said Gatewood, now the church office manager. “To actually have him be at the church — we felt like he was a celebrity.”

The church, at 3240 Adams St., was filled to the capacity of 800, and security was tight. Gatewood didn’t remember King’s exact message, just the calm he exuded. “There was a bomb threat during the service, but he handled in a way that he knew everything was going to be all right.

“He was a man of God. It was just a beautiful time.”

Crowds jammed the sidewalks

The last stop of King’s visit, on Jan. 26, was at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church at 1980 Dahlia St.

Young remembers that Sunday afternoon as snowy, and cold. Still, King drew the biggest turnout the church ever had – an estimated 3,000 strong, including a spillover crowd jamming the sidewalks outside. It was a multiracial gathering, with religious leaders and politicians in the crowd.

Shortly before he was to speak, King became locked in the pastor study area due to a tricky door jam. Ultimately, church leaders propped a ladder outside and the civil rights leader climbed out, carrying his robe.

He spoke to the throngs outside the church, before going inside to talk to the congregation.

Later that year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.

Editor’s note: The 50th anniversary Greater Park Hill News story about Martin Luther King’s visit to Colorado and Park Hill can be read here.