Posted on

Martin Luther King’s Residence

397 Massachusetts Avenue, South End

In 1952-1953, while a graduate student at the Boston University School of Theology, Martin Luther King resided in a building located at 397 Massachusetts Avenue (as indicated by a small plaque on its façade). At the time, it was likely a boarding house in which residents rented rooms.

Image
Plaque on the outside of the building at 397 Massachusetts Avenue.

MLK’s apartment also served as the meeting place for the Dialectical Society, a club dedicated to discussing matters of philosophy and theology and composed largely of African American male graduate students. His future wife, Coretta Scott (who he met in early 1952), lived nearby as she was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, and occasionally participated in the group’s meetings.

In the early 1950, the neighborhood was a vibrant, largely Black community with a rich array of restaurants and jazz clubs, ones where the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington could be seen. Today, only a few of those institutions remain in the heavily gentrified area.

No longer a boarding house, 397 Massachusetts Avenue is today home to apartments owned and maintained by the South End’s Tenants’ Development Corporation. Founded in 1968, the organization works to increase the availability of housing for low- and moderate-income individuals and families.

397 Massachusetts Avenue, 2016. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

Getting there:

Orange Line to Massachusetts Avenue Station. Exit at Massachusetts Avenue and immediately go left. Number 397 is two buildings away on the left-hand side.

Nearby points of interest:

170 St. Botolph Street. At some point after living at 397 Massachusetts Avenue, MLK lived in an apartment in this building.

Wally’s Café Jazz Club (the last of the area’s venerable jazz and blues clubs), 427 Massachusetts Avenue.

Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe. Established in 1927, the white-owned restaurant was featured in The Green Book as it welcomed Black diners and Black jazz musicians during its first few decades, a time when many area establishments. The floor above the restaurant served as the union hall of the Boston branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an African-American-led union. 429 Columbus Avenue.

New England Conservatory of Music, 290 Huntington Avenue.

To learn more:

Cara Feinberg, “When Martin met Coretta,” The Boston Globe, January 22, 2003.

Stephen C. Ferguson II, “The Philosopher King: An Examination of the Influence of Dialectics on King’s Political Thought and Practice,” in Robert E. Birt, The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012:  87-108.

Robert Hayden, “Local activists recall King’s presence in Hub,” The Bay State Banner, January 14, 2015.

For more sites in Boston associated with Martin  Luther King, see the “Malcolm and Martin Tour.” in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

Photo credit:

The photo at the top of the entry is from April 22, 1965. MLK is speaking on the front steps of the William Boardman School in Roxbury, in support of parents working to remedy substandard and unequal schools and racial segregation in the Boston Public Schools. Source: Boston Herald.

Posted on

Columbus Avenue A.M.E. Zion Church

600 Columbus Avenue, South End

Columbus Avenue A.M.E. Zion Church, 2018. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church was born, according to its website, “on June 13, 1838 when seventeen persons of color withdrew from the communion of the Methodist Episcopal Church” on Beacon Hill. The Black worshipers opted to become part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an African American denomination.

The congregation established itself in its current location in 1903, a time when many African Americans were moving to the South End. The church purchased the building (constructed in 1888 and today the oldest synagogue building in Massachusetts) from Temple Adath Israel (now called Temple Israel and located in the Longwood area of Boston’s Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood).

Soon after the move to the South End, the church became the site of a famous conflict between Dorchester resident William Monroe Trotter, the founder of The Guardian, an influential and African American newspaper based in Boston, and Booker T. Washington. Washington’s emphasis on Black self-help and his accommodationist approach to institutionalized racism greatly frustrated Trotter and his allies, who together became known as the Boston Radicals. So when the Boston branch of the National Negro Business League invited Washington to speak at the church on July 30, 1903, Trotter and his supporters went there to confront him.

Plaque on the outside of the Columbus Avenue A.M.E. Zion Church. Photo by Joseph Nevins, 2015.

Trotter’s contentious questions, declaimed from a chair on which he stood as soon after Washington began speaking, led to shouting and shoving between supporters of the two camps; meanwhile someone reportedly threw red pepper and a stink bomb into the large crowd. Boston police, wielding billy clubs, arrested Trotter, accusing him of provoking of what came to be known as the “Boston Riot.”

While calling it a “riot” seems excessive, the event was important in raising Trotter’s stature as a key opponent of Washington. It also strengthened W.E.B. Du Bois’s identification with the Radicals, thus contributing to the formation in 1905 of the Niagara Movement, a Black civil rights organization which, unlike Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine,” took a strong stance against policies of segregation and disenfranchisement.

Getting there:

Orange Line to Massachusetts Avenue station. The church is a 0.2 mile walk away (about 4 minutes). at the corner of Northampton Street.

To learn more:

Howard Manly, “The Guardian,” The Bay State Banner, Vol. 41, No. 25, February 2, 2005.

Elliot M. Rudwick, “Race Leadership Struggle: Background of the Boston Riot of 1903,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1962: 16-24.

Kayla Schott-Bresler, “Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church,” BlackPast.org, undated.

Also see the entry on “The William Monroe Trotter House” in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.