Alliances, civil rights causes brought King to Cincinnati many times

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had several key allies and friends in Cincinnati, which helped to account for the multiple visits the civil rights leader made here.

King was close to the Revs. Fred Shuttlesworth and Lavaughn Venchael (L.V.) Booth.

Shuttlesworth, pastor of Revelation Baptist Church in the West End through the mid-1960s, continued to lead the fight to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, where he'd previously pastored. Shuttlesworth called King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Birmingham in May 1963 to help topple the city's safety director Eugene "Bull" Connor.

Booth, pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Avondale, in 1961 founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a split from the National Baptist Convention USA, which did not support King's ambitious civil and human rights platform. The Progressives did.

A year before his death, on Sept. 8, 1967, King spoke to Progressive Baptist delegates downtown at what is now the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza.

King would be assassinated the following April 4, his death sparking urban violence across the country, including in Cincinnati.

“My views on riots are pretty well known," King told his convention audience. "I am still convinced nonviolence is the most potent weapon for an oppressed people.” But it is necessary, he said, for a truly moral person to “condemn the causes that bring riots as determinedly as he condemns riots.”

King was in Cincinnati three times in 1964. On Sept. 27, he spoke to a capacity audience at Music Hall, campaigning for President Lyndon Johnson and against Republican nominee Barry Goldwater.

According to Enquirer reports, King told his audience that Goldwater "stands for narrow nationalism, and his trigger-happy philosophy could result in the world being plunged into the abyss of atomic desolation."

That weekend, King also campaigned from a flatbed truck for Johnson in the West End.

In 1958, King spoke at Walnut Hills High School as part of the Jewish Community Center's lecture series.

In 1959, he was back to for a voter-registration drive for four-term Cincinnati Councilman Theodore Berry.

In 1962, during a visit, King lashed out at the all-white composition of the city council, saying, "The Negro must discover that one of the most significant steps he can make it to the voting booth."

In 1962, he also paid a visit to the Mount Auburn home of his friends Robert and Louise Shropshire. Louise Shropshire, the music minister at Revelation Baptist – Shuttlesworth's church – was a well-known composer of sacred music. Her hymn "If My Jesus Wills" is widely considered a foundational piece of the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome."