Alabama history professor recalls friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. (original) (raw)

The Rev. Wilson Fallin Jr., shown outside Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, recalls his friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Professor Wilson Fallin Jr., 75, teaches U.S. history three days a week at the University of Montevallo.

When he tells students about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he can add in his own personal memories of his friendship with the pre-eminent leader of America's civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, and today is the national holiday honoring him. This year marks 50 years since King was killed in Memphis, on April 4, 1968.

King spoke at Fallin's church in Bessemer and had dinner with him just a few weeks before King was killed.

Fallin at the time was pastor of New Zion Baptist Church in Bessemer. After King spoke to help set the stage for the Poor People's Campaign Mule Train of 1968, Fallin took King, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to eat dinner at the home of church member Bessy Wilkins, a woman in her 70s, who cooked dinner.

''They laughed and talked about a lot of things,'' Fallin said. ''The air was tense. There had been some death threats. The death threats were getting a little more intimidating.''
King joked and eased the mood. ''He teased Ralph about being born in the Black Belt and that he thought he knew about collard greens,'' Fallin said. "It was hardly more than a month later that King was killed."

Fallin had first met King in 1960, when Fallin was a student from 1960-64 at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

"My wife's sister, Mary Nell Thomas, attended his church, Ebenezer Baptist. She introduced me to him. She said, 'Dr. King, this is my brother-in-law. He's a student at Morehouse, an aspiring minister.'"

Fallin was in awe. "Here he is, the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Fallin next returned to the church with a fellow student who was a youth pastor at Ebenezer Baptist, who asked him to put on a minister's robe and sit on the stage with the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr.

"I was satisfied to sit in the audience," Fallin said. But his friend insisted. "I was already ordained. He said, 'Come on, get a robe. I said, 'Is this alright with Dr. King?' I met him in the robing room. So, I sat on the pulpit, next to Dr. King. It was very intimidating. Very much intimidating. I had met him the first service I didn't sit on the pulpit."

From then on, King recognized him and knew who he was.

"While I was a student at Morehouse, he was on campus," Fallin said. "He and the president of Morehouse, Dr. Benjamin Mays, were very close. He considered Dr. Mays one of his mentors. He said Mays was a good combination of the intellectual and the spiritual. Mays got him to teach a philosophy course one day a week. He did it for a month. He had to give it up. He was just so busy. He might have been involved in Albany at the time."

King led a desegregation campaign in Albany, Ga., starting in November 1961.

Fallin sat in on all the philosophy classes King taught, though he had not enrolled in the class.

"I got permission from him," Fallin said. "He was talking about Gandhi. He talked about Karl Marx. He was very critical of Marxism. He was critical of communism and Marxism, because it was without God. Marx called religion the opiate of the people. King felt religion could be a reforming force. In no way was he a Communist."

King also discussed Albert Camus, the French philosopher who wrote, "The Myth of Sysiphus." Camus argued that man's search for meaning is futile in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values.

"He talked about Camus, who said you never reach the top of the mountain," Fallin said. "He was critical of Camus and existentialism. He loved Kierkegaard, who was a Christian existentialist, where you take the leap of faith. He always tied it to the civil rights movement."

Knowing Dr. King was an important part of Fallin's Morehouse education.

"It was a great time to be in college," Fallin said. "With King on campus, you wanted to be as close to him as you could. He was very approachable. Everybody called him 'Doc.' He'd see me and say, 'Oh, Brother Fallin.' I felt I was somebody."

King was at the time an international celebrity, known for leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 while he was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church from 1954-60. In 1960, King became co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

"We talked about classes at Morehouse," Fallin said. "My feeling is he was a little embarrassed about all of the spotlight that was on him. He was humble."

Fallin fondly recalls the last dinner they ate together in the spring of 1968. "He put away collard greens," Fallin joked on Friday after finishing teaching his four history classes for the day. "It was just a joyous time. I was a young pastor, mystified by all that was going on. All of us are human beings. At bottom, we have to eat and sleep. Learn to laugh and be forgiving. He was certainly a person with a real sense of humor. He loved to laugh, loved to eat, he had no death wish. I don't think there's any question that it was possibly imminent. They were joyous times. He had no martyr complex. He loved life."

While a student at Morehouse, Fallin took part in a march downtown with fellow students. King took part also.

"It was about Rich's Department Store, about employment, hiring blacks as clerks; they had one or two eating places that blacks wanted to integrate," Fallin said. "I was involved in the student movement. I did march in Atlanta. King was there with us. We had student leadership. This was the student movement. He was out there with us, along with Julian Bond and others."

Fallin was part of a group of Morehouse students that tried to integrate the all-white First Baptist Church of Atlanta on a Sunday morning.

"A group of deacons met us at the front door and carried us down the stairs," Fallin said. "They said, 'We're happy to have you downstairs.' We didn't try to break into the sanctuary. We stayed 30 minutes and left. The newspaper came and took a picture."

Fallin said King never pressured him to be more of an activist.

"He did not expect me to be full-time in that kind of business," Fallin said. "He knew I needed to be a student."

But King would call on Fallin in 1968. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People's Campaign that year to draw attention to poverty. The demonstration began in Marks, Miss., the poorest town in the poorest county in the poorest state in the nation, and continued with a Mule Train, with wagons pulled by mules all the way to Washington, D.C., where they would set up on the National Mall in a temporary camp site called "Resurrection City."

The Mule Train needed to stop on the west side of Birmingham.

"I think Abernathy called me and said, 'Fallin, Dr. King wants to talk to you.' They asked permission to use the church. They wanted to be there a couple days. They needed a place to house the wagons. He called me and asked if our church could be the headquarters church. Going to Washington meant going to the west of Birmingham. He spent two and a half days there. A couple of weeks after that, he was killed. He was real tense during that time. He was always under some pressure. He spoke that night. It was a packed audience."

After King's death, the Mule Train planned by King and Abernathy was carried out by Abernathy. It left Marks, Mississippi, on May 13, 1968, and stopped in Bessemer as King had arranged a few weeks earlier.

"For three days, we hosted the wagon train that was a part of the Poor People's Campaign that was headed to Washington," Fallin said.

Fallin said King was calm in the face of the threats against him, even though he would soon die for his cause. ''He was a man that loved life,'' Fallin said.

A few years after King's death, Fallin invited King's father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., to preach at his church in Bessemer.

"His father came and spoke for me for a special program," Fallin said. "I cherish those opportunities I had with the King family."

Fallin is the author of ''A Shelter in the Storm: The African-American Church in Birmingham, 1815-1963,'' and other books, and was the first black to receive a doctoral degree in history from the University of Alabama, in 1995.

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