Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose birthday was celebrated as a federal holiday Monday, seemed to be everywhere in 1963 as cities across the country battled over the desegregation of schools and the integration of public accommodations.
However, one place he wasn’t was in Chattanooga. While desegregation skirmishes made national headlines as close as Birmingham, and the Baptist minister of necessity was a frequent visitor there, he didn’t need to come here. Quietly but effectively, the city was handling its own racial sins.
And while King had occasion to mention the area in his heralded speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963 — “let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee” — the city in the shadow of Lookout Mountain was in the process of offering a measure of that freedom to the citizens who had been denied it through the passage of Jim Crow laws years earlier.
Less than a week after King’s speech, Chattanooga Mayor Ralph Kelley praised the city’s citizens for their calm in a speech to the Kiwanis Club.