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.
That Rice had shaped the boy who would grow into the movement, and that the man now wished to honor his mentor’s life and service, was the whole of it. There was no march planned. No demonstration. No demand beyond the simple human act of gratitude.
The street outside told a different story.
The trouble had begun weeks before King ever set foot in Essex County. When the retirement ceremony for Rice outgrew the church — such was King’s drawing power in September of 1966, just one and a half years before an assassin’s bullet would find him in Memphis — organizers arranged to move the event to the Montclair High School auditorium, a public facility capable of accommodating the thousands who wished to attend.
The announcement detonated something ugly in the white community.
Residents objected, loudly and with the force of municipal pressure, to the use of public school property for what they characterized as a church event.
The municipality responded by ordering the church to surrender half the tickets it had already distributed to its congregation — a concession that stripped seats from Black parishioners to satisfy a white grievance.
The irony was not subtle. King had that morning, before a crowd of some 3,000 people gathered in the school gymnasium — a predominantly white audience whose very objections had secured their attendance — spoken at length about the machinery of educational segregation.
He stood in a newly renovated public school and described, in specific and unflinching terms, the physical ruin of the schools to which Black children in America were still being consigned.
The walls were crumbling, he said. The textbooks were outdated. The materials were absent. The hypocrisy hung in the gymnasium air like something you could reach out and touch.
Then he was escorted to the band room to wait.
King did not appear to regard the waiting as an indignity, at least not publicly.
He sat in his folding chair, bodyguard at his side, and he watched the protest through the windows with the particular stillness of a man who has been told to leave a great many towns and has not yet left any of them.
When he spoke to the congregation that afternoon — the speech that had been the purpose of the entire visit, the ceremony for Rice that had set all of this in motion — he carried with him everything the day had already given him: the gymnasium crowd, the protesters, the stripped tickets, the band room window.
At a news conference earlier in the day, he had addressed the fractures beginning to show within the broader civil rights movement, the competing philosophies of power and protest that were pulling organizations apart.
“I am pessimistic,” he said, without apparent self-pity. “I don’t feel we’ll get it through this year.” He was speaking of civil rights legislation stalled in Congress, but he might as well have been speaking of Montclair. “They feel we are split up. We can’t say to Congress anymore: You’ve got to pass this bill.”
He was equally unambiguous on the question of nonviolence, which had come under sustained challenge from younger voices in the movement.
“I still believe in nonviolence,” he said, “and no one is going to turn me around on that point. If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I am going to stand up and be the only voice to say that it is wrong.”
When pressed about the arrest of Stokely Carmichael — the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman who had been jailed following riots in Atlanta the previous week on a misdemeanor charge of inciting a riot, initially held on $11,000 bail — King declined to render judgment. “The matter is in the courts,” he said carefully, “and under our system of justice a man is innocent until proven guilty.”
He did allow that he thought the bail had been set too high.
These were not the remarks of a man rattled by the morning’s reception. They were the remarks of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by the distance between America’s stated values and its practiced ones.
Montclair, it should be said, has always believed itself to be a particular kind of town — diverse, educated, spiritually serious, socially aware. It is a place that takes some pride in its own decency. That pride makes what happened on Park Street on September 11, 1966 not easier to explain, but harder to dismiss. Hatred in a town that knows better is not less consequential than hatred in a town that claims ignorance. It may, in fact, be more revealing.
King spoke to the congregation. He honored Rice. He left.
For decades afterward, almost no one in Montclair talked about it. The high school students didn’t know. Their parents didn’t say. The curriculum skipped it entirely.
It was not until 2016 — fifty years later — that former Montclair High School principal James Earle found a yellowed newspaper photograph in the back of a filing cabinet: a man in a suit seated in a metal folding chair, hands clasped, a bodyguard standing nearby, in a room Earle gradually recognized as the school’s own band room.
There was no headline attached to it. No caption. No date. It had simply been filed away, as uncomfortable truths so often are, until someone thought to look.
The photograph was eventually identified. A plaque now marks the spot in the band room where King sat and waited and watched, in the narrow interval between one crowd’s curiosity and another crowd’s rage, for his turn to say what he had come to say.
He said it. He always did.
Nearly six decades later, New Jersey still has some of the most severely segregated schools in the country.
While the buildings Black children attend are no longer crumbling and textbooks are more up to date, racial segregation remains deeply entrenched, limiting kids’ ability to connect with peers who don’t look like them.
In 2018, Latino Action Network and NAACP New Jersey State Conference, among other groups and families that comprise the plaintiffs, sued the state for failing to address long-standing de facto segregation in public schools—a blow to New Jersey’s progressive image.
The administration of former Governor Phil Murphy resisted a quick, fair solution, and a 99-page ruling in October 2023 by Superior Court Judge Robert Lougy stopped short of requiring New Jersey to integrate some of the nation’s most severely segregated schools, which prompted the parties to attempt to resolve the matter in mediation.
The Murphy administration stubbornly refused to change laws, policies, and practices that require students to attend schools in the geographic locations where they live.
Now, the plaintiffs want the appellate court to step in and make a judgment on the state’s liability for allowing de facto segregation to endure in its school system, despite it violating the state constitution, which is explicit in its ban on school segregation.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote in documents filed in the Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division that the trial court agreed with them on the key constitutional issues and even acknowledged that the state failed to address the segregation. However, instead of concluding that the defendants had violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, the trial court decided to leave the question of liability for another time.
“But rather than reach the only logical conclusion that followed — that the state defendants violated plaintiffs’ constitutional rights — the trial court left the question of liability for another day,” plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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