Former U.S. senator and ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, 77, told the crowd at Paducah’s 35th annual Martin Luther King Day luncheon that the Aug. 14, 1966, Gage Park open housing march in Chicago, her hometown, was “a transformative moment for me.”
King led the march.
“My mother had told me not to go to the march,” Moseley Braun remembered. “She said you’ll get hurt, and it’s going to be terrible.” But she said that on that Sunday, King’s nonviolent response to violence “set an example for the rest of us. He was above it all and so calm in the face of that hatred and evil.”
King and “1,200 civil rights demonstrators of the Chicago Freedom Movement marched for open housing in three” all white neighborhoods, including Gage Park, the Chicago Tribune reported. The marchers were met with a fusillade of “bottles, rocks, and firecrackers” thrown by jeering whites, according to the paper.
Carol Elizabeth Moseley was two days shy of her 19th birthday when she joined the marchers. As was custom in King-led civil rights marches, she explained, “they would put the women and children around his person and then around us would be the veterans of the civil rights marches and around that would be the men who could take the bottles and the brickbats, et cetera.”
She said she was close to King when “a bottle hit him, and he started to bleed a little bit then, and of course, we were all panic stricken.”
But King was unflappable. “He had a look of beneficence on his face that I will always remember. He never got angry. He never frowned. He never had a scowl on his face. He didn’t cuss anybody out which I might have done under the circumstances.”
King had been leading civil rights protests in the Jim Crow South, where resistance to desegregation was stubborn and often violent. In late 1965 he came to Chicago to fight discrimination in a big city where Blacks were ghettoized in poverty.
“He once said that Chicago was one of the hardest nuts to crack,” Braun recalled.
Chicago was one of the country’s most segregated cities. Many whites were determined to maintain de facto discrimination. Like in the old Confederacy, many Chicago whites turned to violence. In a housing march in all-white Marquette Park, he was knocked down by a brick which struck him in the head.
He and the marchers persevered and helped lessen segregation. But housing discrimination persists.
Meanwhile, Moseley Braun went on to earn a law degree and to work as an assistant federal attorney before entering politics. A Democrat, she was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1978 and became the first Black woman chosen as assistant majority leader. (In between, she was elected Cook County recorder of deeds.) In 1992, she became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
Defeated for reelection, President Bill Clinton named her U.S ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa in 1998. Last year, President Joe Biden nominated her as a member and chair of the board of directors of the United States African Development Foundation.
In Paducah, she was walking with a cane, the result of a recent fall while she was getting off an airplane in Mauritania. Moseley Braun gave her speech seated in a chair on the stage of the Paducah Tilghman High School Auditorium. The program theme was “Mission Possible: Protecting Freedom, Justice, & Democracy in the Spirit of Nonviolence 365.” The MLK Day observance was presented by the Paducah-McCracken County NAACP and the Bryant Law Center.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday observed on the third Monday in January. King was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta.
Moseley Braun said King, who was assassinated in Memphis less than two years after she marched with him in Chicago, convinced her to always look “for the nonviolent approach and solution that he exemplified that morning [in Gage Park]. He had the humility that was required for leadership, and he was gracious in a way that not just inspired me, it made me feel almost ashamed of myself because I really wanted to throw something back at somebody.
“Now in hindsight, I can see that his reaction was a guiding light for everybody there that day.”
King, she recalled, famously said “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”
“What are you doing to serve others?” she asked, challenged the audience to do as King urged — “to commit ourselves to doing the best we can do for others, and that’s what he called on each of us to do.”
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