On a morning that should have belonged entirely to the memory of a retiring Baptist minister and the peaceful passage of one generation’s faith to another, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat alone in a metal folding chair inside a high school band room, hands clasped in front of him, listening to the sound of his own rejection rise from the street below.
Through the east-facing windows of the Montclair High School band room, King could see them — white residents of this ostensibly progressive New Jersey township, lined along Park Street in open protest of his presence, making clear in the language of placards and fury that the most prominent civil rights leader in the United States of America was not welcome here. Not in their school. Not in their town.
He had come, as he had come to so many places before, not to provoke but to honor. The occasion was the retirement of the Rev. Dr. Deuel Converse Rice, pastor of the United Baptist Church of Montclair — a man who had mentored young Martin King during those childhood summers when King traveled north from Georgia to visit family in Paterson, N.J…