Prime Minister Nkrumah invites King to attend the independence celebrations marking the transition of the British colony the Gold Coast to the new African nation of Ghana.1 King accepted the invitation on 12 February, and traveled with Coretta King to the festivities in early March.
REV MARTIN LUTTER KING
ROOM 825,
5 BEEKMAN STREET,
NEW YORK.2
Following up on the conversation he had with Nixon in Ghana, King proposes possible dates for a meeting in Washington. On 23 May, Nixon agreed to meet with King in his Senate office on 13 June.1 King confirmed on 28 May, noting that he was “looking forward with great anticipation to a most profitable afternoon together.”
Mr. Richard Nixon, Vice-president
The United States of America
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Nixon:
On 13 March Kernahan, pastor of the Community Methodist Church in West Van Nuys, California, wrote to recommend that King read his Christian Century account of a community group's efforts to desegregate housing in Orange County.1 Kernahan said he felt King would “be interested to know that a major battle in the struggle for equal rights to unsegregated housing (the crux of the race problem in the North and the West) has been won in Southern California.” Kernahan also enclosed an editor
Just before 2 A.M. on 10 January, several black churches and homes in Montgomery were bombed, including Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church and parsonage.1 King and Abernathy rushed home from Atlanta—where they were to convene the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration—after receiving a phone call from Juanita Abernathy.
King responds to Evers’s invitation to speak in Mississippi. Evers wrote King on 17 December to say that “our greatest inspiration was Sunday's mass meeting where thousands of liberty-loving Americans closed out the Institute. . . . Our only regret was that we were unable to attend all the previous sessions in which you had engaged.”
Writing to an Atlanta attorney, King recounts how, en route to a speaking engagement at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, he ‘‘refused to eat under segregated conditions” at the Dobbs House restaurant at the Atlanta airport.1 He told the manager who offered to seat King in a “dingy” segregated section that such practices in interstate transportation had been prohibited by a recent Supreme Court decision.
Dear Martin,
It was a great pleasure to have you in our home. Our only regrets were that the time was so short and that the rest of your family could not be with you.
In a 16 September letter to King, Muelder noted that he had been following "with admiration and keen interest your leadership and experiences in the dramatic days of the past year." He invited King and his wife to "spend a week or so away from the daily tensions by coming to Boston and enjoying a quiet retreat." 1
Dr. Walter G. Muelder, Dean
School of Theology
Boston University
745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston 15, Massachusetts
Steele, president of Tallahassee's Inter-Civic Council and leader of that city's five-month bus boycott, expresses regret that King was unable to speak in Tallahassee on 21 October as previously scheduled. King gave the Sunday sermon at Dexter that morning after a week-long speaking tour, but due to an unidentified “emergency” he was unable to attend the mass meeting in Tallahassee that evening. The day before, Steele and twenty other Inter-Civic Council activists had been fined for operating an unlicensed car pool.
King agrees to meet with his former dissertation advisor and interested Boston University students for lunch on 30 October. King delivered "A Realistic Look at Race Relations” to the Ford Hall Forum (which met in Boston University's Jordan Hall) on 28 October, but he canceled his subsequent engagements after receiving word of a possible court injunction against the bus boycott.1
