Editor’s note: This is an abridged version of a speech delivered at Durham’s Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Church for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon, on Sunday, January 19, 2025.
Dr. King loved Durham. He loved coming to Durham. He had close friends in Durham, like the Michauxes, McKissicks, and grad school classmate Rev. Douglas Moore, who was the pastor who led the boycott of the Royal Ice Cream Parlor here in Durham in 1957, three years before the much better known Greensboro Woolworth Sit-In.
Dr. King traveled to Durham five times for official engagements from 1956 to 1964. This was significant because King was in such demand, from his rise onto the scene as a national leader in December 1955 as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott to his assassination 12.5 years later in Memphis, Tennessee, marching for the wages and rights of sanitation workers, that he rarely visited places multiple times unless he was engaged in active work there such as protests and marches. Yet King did not travel to Durham to hold protests or marches…