Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1986

Staff photo by Cynthia Smith

Dr. Robert Johnson-Smith, pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown, looks at photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Click the image for a larger view)

The Daily Intelligencer ran this story the day before America celebrated its first official Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1986.

January 19, 1986

The Daily Intelligencer

Minister to honor friend's special quest

By Peggy L. Salvatore

Staff Writer

Monday marks the first national holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

While celebrating King's life and work may be new for many this year, the Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown has been honoring the late civil rights leader for 10 years.

In recognition of the national stature given the holiday, as well as the values for which King stood, the Rev. Dr. Robert Johnson-Smith, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, has invited a white speaker to the event for the first time.

"It's a national holiday now, and that's why we thought we should go broader and have a white speaker," Johnson-Smith said.

U.S. Rep. Robert W. Edgar, D-7, of Delaware County, will address the congregation today at 11 a.m. He will speak from the same pulpit that King spoke from more than 20 years ago.

Johnson-Smith and King were friends before the civil rights leader gained national attention after his "I Have a Dream" speech during the historic March on Washington, D.C., in August 1963.

An inkling of King's future stature was in evidence in his relentless pursuit of knowledge as a college student a few years behind Johnson-Smith at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., according to Johnson-Smith.

But the scope of the recognition he would receive was not readily apparent in the early years, he said. Johnson-Smith said he thinks King's death at the hands of an assassin In 1968 secured his place in history.

"Had he lived to be an old man — to collect Social Security — I don't think he would have been a legend to the extent he is now. I'm sure all these honors and this holiday would have been inconceivable. It is in the same vein as John Kennedy if he had lived to be an ex-president," Johnson-Smith said.

King and his father, the late Dr. Martin Luther King Sr , and the Johnson-Smith family have a friendship that goes back a generation.

King Sr. was a Baptist minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., at the time that Johnson-Smith's father was a minister at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Chicago The two ministers were friends.

So when Johnson-Smith went to school at Morehouse m the 1950s in Atlanta, naturally he attended King's church.

"I was attending college He (Martin Luther King Jr.) had not entered because Martin was in high school, but he visited because his father was on the (Morehouse) trustee board," Johnson-Smith said.

He said that after college the friendship picked up again in the late 1950s after Johnson-Smith started his ministry at Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown and King attended Crozier Seminary in Chester.

"I worked with him with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and he visited here in this church several times," Johnson-Smith said.

In those days, before the historic March on Washington in August 1963, Johnson- Smith would try to encourage his congregation — not always successfully — to hear the powerful speaker when he visited Jenkintown.

But in October 1963, when King visited the Salem Baptist Church on Summit Avenue, the street had to be blocked off because the crowd had spilled out of the newly built church.

Some parts of the Jenkintown church now stand as memorials to King.

A small chapel at the back of the main church was dedicated in memory of the slain civil rights leader in 1969.

At the front of the church is a stained glass window which bears the inscription, "A Gift from the Women of Salem," because a $1,500 gift given to King by the Salem Baptist women's group was returned to the women. King asked that the window be dedicated from the women and that his name not be used, Johnson-Smith said.

The strongest memorial to King lies in the heart of the Jenkintown minister, who fears many of King's values may be getting lost.

"King would oppose discrimination of any kind — race, color, creed. That may be part of his heritage that is slipping away," he said.

"I think what may be forgotten, as I see it, he was more than a civil rights advocate. He was really a humanitarian who advocated nonviolence There was no doubt in his mind nonviolence was the way His concern wasn't just for blacks and poor," he said.