MLK’s dream had its genesis at Dublin church

Every famous person has a genesis. 

A best-selling author begins by writing the first sentence of his first book on a park bench. A renowned opera singer appears in her first performance at a small music venue.

The manger scene for civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King came at the First African Baptist Church in Dublin, on April 17, 1944, three months after his 15th birthday 

He was a student at Booker T. Washington High School and had won an oratorical contest sponsored by the Atlanta “Colored” Elks Club. He was accompanied by a teacher to the state convention of the Elks Clubs in Dublin. 

It was the first public speech by a man who would become one of America’s greatest orators, whose words continue to resonate with millions of people all over the world almost 57 years after his death.

A plaque on the front of the church carries these words: “At this site, a seed was planted in his heart that would grow into his life’s work. His journey to the mountain top began here.’’

The topic of the young King’s 991-word essay that day was “The Negro and the Constitution. ’’ The audience was considerably smaller than the 250,000 people who would attend his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1963.

But those who sat on the wooden pews had front-row seats to history. His words were delivered from the same pulpit that is still  there today. 

King argued that the treatment of blacks was not consistent with the Constitution.

“We cannot have a nation orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitudes and crime,” King said. “Today, 13 million black sons and daughters of our forefathers continue the fight for the translation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments from writing on the printed page to an actuality.’’

Twenty years later, in 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Scott Thompson, a local historian and Dublin real estate attorney, said it has been a point of pride in the community that the message King delivered that day played “a small part in the initial Civil Rights movement and that the first speech was given here.’’

He said he began researching King’s speech in 2001. King wrote about it in “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.”

In Chapter 1, the “Early Years,’’ King wrote about winning the state contest and included excerpts from the speech. 

But an incident that happened on the trip back to Atlanta sparked a fire that burned for the rest of his life.

“That night, Mrs. Bradley (his teacher) and I were on a bus returning to Atlanta,’’ King wrote. “Along the way, some white passengers boarded the bus, and the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us. I intended to stay right in that seat, but Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. We stood up in the aisle for ninety miles to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.’’

Thompson said he found references to King’s speech in The Dublin Courier-Herald, but it was not treated as front-page news. 

Like many other newspapers in the segregated South of the 1940s, stories about Black Americans were often relegated to the inside pages and separated from other content. (In Macon, the Telegraph published a  separate section for Black readers  called “News of the Colored Community.”)

  According to Thompson, King’s speech was not his only tether to Dublin and Laurens County. 

Five months later, he enrolled at Atlanta’s Morehouse College as a 15-year-old freshman.  One of his professors was Dr. Brailsford Brazeal, who was a native of Montrose, a community 15 miles west of Dublin.

 Brazeal was the Dean of Men at Morehouse. He encouraged King to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a minister. He wrote a letter of recommendation for him to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where King received a Bachelor of Divinity degree and was elected student body president.

Thompson said King was also friends with Hubert Horatio “Hub”  Dudley, an influential black leader in Dublin who organized secret strategy sessions with civil rights leaders King, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Maynard Jackson and others at the motel and cafe he owned on East Jackson Street.

First African Baptist was established in 1867, two years after the Civil War, and is the city’s oldest black church. It was founded with the help of the primarily white congregation at nearby First Baptist Church, which donated a stained glass window to its sister church. The original wooden church was torn down and rebuilt in 1914.  

One hundred years after the new brick church opened its doors, community leaders began planning a project to commemorate the historical impact of King’s speech at First African. Those efforts later resulted in its designation as a national historic site. 

The project was spearheaded by Visit Dublin. Using public and private funding, the city opened a quarter-acre park in 2017 at the corner of Church Street and U.S. 441,  adjacent to the First African church on Telfair Street.

It includes a large mural on an adjacent building by Atlanta artist Corey Barksdale. A sculpture by Dublin artist Juan Llereas and a photo mural by another local artist, Randall Gearhart, are part of the presentation. 

That same year, the Georgia Tourism Authority partnered with The King Center in Atlanta to create Georgia’s Footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Trail. The church and the park are points of interest on the trail.

Dublin honors King’s legacy in other ways. The 29th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade will be held Saturday in downtown Dublin.

The church hosts an annual oratorical contest in April. There is a stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive a block from the church. It is one of about 950 streets named after King in 41 states and more than 100 in his home state of Georgia.