1967: MLK Was a Frequent Visitor to Cleveland

Many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaigns took place in the South.

He led sit-ins in his hometown of Atlanta, was a key organizer of the bus boycott in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and marched in 1965 in Selma, Alabama.

He also spent time in Cleveland, stopping regularly throughout the 1960s. (One reason he gave for his fondness for the city was its Black population, consisting of many former Alabamians who came in the Great Migration.) He visited on many occasions in 1967, as the city recovered from the previous year’s Hough riots and Carl Stokes made another run for mayor. In April, he gave his “Rise Up” speech at Glenville High School (rediscovered in 2011 in the Glenville branch of Cleveland Public Library).

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And in July, while Detroit was ablaze with riots, King told crowds on the East Side of Cleveland not to do the same thing. “I’m not going to tell you to burn down Cleveland,” he said, according to The Plain Dealer. Rather, he encouraged economic protests, including Operation Breadbasket, a project he’d introduced the previous year in Chicago that encouraged area businesses to have a workforce more representative of its population, resulting in a boycott of Sealtest Dairy, which had an operation in Cleveland. He encouraged rent strikes against landlords, saying an East Side neighborhood was “the worst slum I ever saw.”

King encouraged political involvement, as well, even if it wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t easy. “Too many Negroes want to take a non-stop flight from Egypt to the Promised Land,” he said. “We have to sacrifice and work. If the inexpressible oppression of slavery could not stop us, then the obstacles now to our freedom can surely be overcome. God is on our side.”

Stokes was elected mayor that fall, the first Black mayor of a major city. On April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, King was shot and killed. He was supposed to return to Cleveland the following week.

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