Nicholas Pugliese reports for WHYY
Thelma Lowery remembers a day in June 1950 when two young men at her family’s home discussed staging a sit-in at a bar in Maple Shade, New Jersey.
“Daddy told them” not to go, Lowery recalled in a 2017 interview. “And Martin said, ‘Well, it’s a free country, you know. They shouldn’t be segregated, you know.’ And they went. And they got locked up.”
The “Martin” in her story is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a 21-year-old seminary student studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, planning one of his first acts of civil disobedience. It culminated with the white tavern owner firing a gun in the air.
And the setting was 753 Walnut St., a two-story row house in Camden owned by relatives of King’s classmate.
That structure, which local activists want to preserve as a key waypoint in King’s early development, is now on the verge of collapse in the face of indecision by local and state officials.
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