When MLK came to Grosse Pointe

Three weeks before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. made one of his last speeches to a Michigan audience. And not just any audience; he went deep into the belly of the segregated beast, speaking to an audience at Grosse Pointe High School (now Grosse Pointe South) on March 14, 1968.

At the time, Grosse Pointe was virtually an entirely white community (and still is very much so, although it's diversifying rapidly). A right-wing group called Breakthrough agitated early and often against his appearance, which was under discussion for months beforehand. The school board finally voted 5-2 to allow the speech at the school, but only after taking out a $1 million insurance policy against damages to the building and grounds.

Once approved, the visit required the planning and coordination of the Normandy invasion. Threats and abuse were phoned and mailed in to the school, board members and especially members of the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council, which sponsored the event. Organizer Jude Huetteman recalled, in a piece for the Detroit Free Press in 1974, receiving an anonymous call that her children had been kidnapped from their school. Of course they hadn't, but it was only one part of the ordeal she and others endured trying to pull off such a momentous event.

Security was such a concern King was driven to the event with the Grosse Pointe Farms chief of police sitting in his lap. Breakthrough protesters circled the school in cars, shouting, "King is a traitor," while local teenagers shouted back, some punctuating their remarks with snowballs.

When King took the stage the overflow crowd greeted him warmly, but at the first mention of the Vietnam war, the heckling started. Huetteman wrote that he was interrupted 32 times by applause, but many times by hecklers, as well. Some were escorted out. One was beckoned to the stage by King, who asked the young man to explain why he thought of the speaker as a traitor.

As for the speech itself? King spoke of "the other America," without naming Detroit, which was then not yet the near-reverse version of Grosse Pointe it is today. He spoke of unemployed adults, substandard housing and poor schools, of neighborhoods filled with despair.

Toward the end, he reminded the audience of their interconnectedness:

Let me say finally, that in the midst of the hollering and in the midst of the discourtesy tonight, we got to come to see that however much we dislike it, the destinies of white and black America are tied together. Now the races don't understand this apparently. But our destinies are tied together. And somehow, we must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we're all going to perish together as fools. ...Whether we like it or not culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit negro and every negro is a little bit white. Our language, our music, our material prosperity and even our food are an amalgam of black and white, so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes and there can ultimately be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster without recognizing the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity.

Huetteman said she drove King back to his hotel and told him goodbye, that she expected she'd never see him again but she would never forget that night. Of course, she did see him again, three weeks later, lying in his casket in Atlanta. She concludes with an even more obscure fact:

I later read in the New York Times that the FBI report on James Earl Ray placed him in Windsor that week of March 14. Maybe he was there that night. We will never know. If so, we only postponed the inevitable.

The Grosse Pointe Historical Society maintains an excellent online resource about the evening, including audio and transcripts of the speech, and a photo gallery that includes scans of Huetteman's essay and other press clippings.