On Monday, the nation pauses to honor the living legacy of its great saint of nonviolence, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The national holiday has particular significance for many who worked with King in the struggle to achieve a measure of civil rights for the black citizens of America, particularly in the deep South. One who worked with him in that cause is retired Unitarian minister Adele Smith-Penniman, who spent a quiet hour recently reminiscing about her days registering African American voters in South Carolina with King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Sipping a cup of tea by the wood stove of her cozy home on the corner of Wickett Pond Road in Wendell, where she has lived for the last four years, Smith-Penniman said, “I worked with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference while I was still in college, in the summer of 1965. Our focus was on voter registration, first in Columbia, the capital, and later in rural Kershaw County, primarily around the town of Camden.”

This was by no means a safe thing for a young black woman from Boston to do in the summer of 1965. The previous summer, two young Jewish men from New York City, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, each got a .38 caliber bullet in the heart the day after they met up with Andrew Goodman, a 20-year old black man from Meridian, in preparation for a voter registration drive in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Goodman was beaten severely, before he too was shot and killed.

The discovery of their decomposing bodies buried under an earthen dam 44 days later prompted national - and international - outrage. On March 7th, 1965, the unprovoked attack by Alabama state troopers and local police against peaceful marchers in Selma, on their way to the state capital in Montgomery to demand voting rights, galvanized Washington into action. Midway through the summer of 1965, Congress passed and president Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, outlawing literacy tests and, eventually, poll taxes and other obstacles to the right of black citizens to vote.

Smith-Penniman recalled, “In those day, people were barred from going to the polls. If they got inside, the sheriff determined whether you could pass a literacy test,” which required potential voters to read and understand sections of the state constitution, for example, before qualifying to vote. The law was interpreted loosely for white registrants, who could qualify even if illiterate, if white registrars deemed they could understand a section of the constitution read aloud to them.

Other means of discriminating against potential black voters included the 'grandfather clause,' which granted voting rights to anyone whose forefathers had been eligible to vote prior to 1867, thereby excluding blacks. Poll taxes were equally discriminatory against the poor throughout the south, whether black or white.

Smith-Penniman credited her father with giving her the moral foundation and courage to participate in the difficult and dangerous work of registering black voters in the Jim Crow South. “He was born and raised in Haiti; he was used to a country run by blacks, and had not experienced white racism,” before moving to Boston. “He believed anything you wanted to do, you could do.”

The seeds of her social conscience were planted early, when she took part in vigils organized by Boston area Quakers against the VietNam war, “on Fridays at the Park Street Common, in the early 60s, long before anyone else” had thought of protesting that war.

She attended school in Newton, after her parents moved there in 1954 from the mixed-racial neighborhood of Roxbury (“at the time Roxbury was one third Irish, one third black, one third Jewish”). Her father defied the real estate agents in Newton, who turned him down every time he looked at a house there. When he finally found a house he could buy in that white suburb, neighbors got up a petition asking their family to move out, and real estate agents began advising folks to “get out fast, blacks are moving in.”

Smith-Penniman began volunteering with the Boston office of the Congress for Racial Equality after school. When she felt the call to throw in her lot with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the South, her mother worried about her traveling there, but her father, who had attended the March on Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963, signed her permission form.

Eighteen years old, Smith-Penniman journeyed to Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college, to receive a coordinated weeklong training with people like Hosea Williams, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. Five hundred college student volunteers from around the country attended, black and white, to take part in the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, developing voter registration drives in 15 'black belts' throughout five Southern states.

Smith-Penniman recalled, “They were predominately white northern students,” who had traveled south, inspired by the work the SCLC was doing to challenge the apartheid system of discrimination and segregation in the Jim Crow South.

SCOPE was a project conceived and organized by Hosea Williams, who had risen to prominence in Savannah, GA, where he spearheaded the first successful desegregation effort of a Southern passenger train, the Nancy Hanks, that ran from Savannah to Atlanta, and led the integration of Tybee Beach, the first public beach to accommodate both races in the South.

In Howell Raines' great first person compendium of interviews with American Civil Rights movement leaders, My Soul is Rested, he quotes Williams recalling his upbringing and early influences:

“I was born in poverty… and reared up in Decatur County, Georgia. That's southwest Georgia, and the racism and segregation was so prevalent, until it was something that you had to notice… We used to walk two and a half miles to school. The white kids always had a bus. No black kids were allowed to ride the bus, and it looked to me like every day, probably just my imagination, those white kids would spit on us and throw rocks at us, holler, and call us 'niggers,'… and I just knew that was not right.

I remember one time after I bought this new home and new car… you know, I was a social climbin', middle class Negro. I guess I was the first black person in Savannah to have a zoysia lawn. I remember buying this grass from Sears & Roebuck, and had sodded my lawn, and I was out there one day tryin' to water it, and my hose would not stretch to sprinkle across the whole lawn. I had a big lot there. And I went back up to this new drugstore… gonna buy some hose connectors, an extension to a hose… And I carried my two sons with me. They wasn't but about six and seven, and as we walked into this drugstore, it had a long lunch counter and these white kids were sittin' on these stools, spinnin' around, eatin' hot dogs and drinkin' Co-cola.

“And my boys started askin' me, 'Daddy, let's get a sandwich and a Coke.' But I always will believe what they wanted to do was play on those stools, and I said, 'Naw, you cain't have a Coke and sandwich.' And one of 'em started cryin'. And I said, 'Well, you know, I'm gonna take you back home and Momma'll fix you a hot dog and give you a Coke,' and then both of 'em started cryin'. And both of 'em just fell out in the floor, which was very unusual for my kids to do me like that. And I remember stoopin' down and I started cryin', because I realized I couldn't tell them the truth.

“The truth was they was black and they didn't 'low black people to use them lunch counters. So I picked the two kids up and went back to the car and I guess I made 'em a promise that I'd bring 'em back someday. So that really got me involved.”

Smith-Penniman recalled, “Doing the trainings, we were there white and black, North and South. And to meet people of such stature was a thrilling experience. They were very strong thinkers, people with such compassion. There was just a brilliance about people like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King.”

Raines quotes Rustin recalling how he came to be associated with King, at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956:

“My meeting with Dr. King came about because I at that time worked for an organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was a pacifist organization. I got a telegram [from Lillian Smith, the writer from Georgia] saying that she felt I had worked with the Gandhi movement in India, that it would be a good idea for me to go to see Dr. King [then 26 years old, and recently elected the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association] because he was a young man and he had not had great experience in handling nonviolent tactics…

“Now, contrary to what many people think, Dr. King was not a confirmed believer in nonviolence, totally, at the time that the boycott began. On my second visit there, the house was still being protected by armed guards. In fact, when I went in, I went in with a chap whose name was Bill Worthy… As Bill went to sit down in the King living room, I said, 'Hey, Bill, wait!' I said, 'There's a gun in that chair.' And he might have sat on it. But it was gradually over several weeks that Dr. King continuously deepened his commitment to nonviolence, and within six weeks, he had demanded that there be no armed guards and no effort associating himself in any form with violence…

“I take no credit for Dr. King's development, but I think the fact that Dr. King had someone around recommending certain readings and discussing these things with him was helpful to bring up in him what was already obviously there…

“It's a very curious thing, and I very seldom would dare to say such a thing, but when I got to know Martin well, I said to him one day, 'Martin, I have a feeling that you had better prepare yourself for martyrdom, because I don't see how you can make the challenge that you are making here without a very real possibility of your being murdered, and I wonder if you have made your peace with that.' And I also told him that I could feel something in him that was akin to what one felt in the Gandhi circle. There was a… well, I quoted a Negro spiritual and I said, 'I have the feeling the Lord has laid his hands on you and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.'”

“Our days began early,” recalled Smith-Penniman. “We would get up and knock on every door and listen (to what the people in Kenshaw County had to say), and we would encourage people to register to vote. We would hold mass meetings in the church, where the ministers would be in the leadership. It was very powerful.

“Every few weeks we would get in our cars and gather people up and drive them to the polling place. One thing that struck me was the sacrifice people would make to register to vote. People were risking their jobs, their lives, to vote.”

She said, “Religion and faith were such a strong part of the movement. One meeting in the church someone came in and said, 'They're burning a cross out there.' We just sang even louder.”

Smith-Penniman said during the course of her work in Camden, SC, “Over 150 new people registered to vote, where maybe only a dozen were registered before I got there.”

The changes that come to a community when it organizes and gains political power are reflected in many ways, Smith-Penniman said. “The faces of who we see as mayor or as our state legislators more truly represent us. And on a material level… if you worked as a domestic, you were able to earn maybe $25 a week. There was a black middle class of teachers and ministers, but if you weren't in the middle class, you had very few avenues open to you to put food on the table. The basic necessities weren't there.”

She said racism affected every aspect of life in the South at the time she worked there. She spoke of a fair-skinned man who went into the hospital in Columbia for surgery, and was placed in a white ward until his family came to visit, at which point he was placed on a gurney and wheeled across the yard in a rainstorm to the black ward. She talked of people living in one or two room shacks with no electricity or running water in the Black Bottom neighborhood in Columbia, within sight of the capital dome.

While she was in Kernshaw County, knocking on doors to register people, a neighbor told her, “There's a baby down the road who is starving to death.” When she found the family, the 7-month-old weighed only nine pounds: the mother had nothing to feed her with. But the doctor at the local hospital would not admit the child. He told her, “If we admitted every baby in the county who is hungry there wouldn't be any room for other needs.”

Later, civil rights workers brought the mother, whose name was Clayvon, back to the hospital, where her baby, Sylvia, was admitted by a Quaker doctor. But the first physician discharged the infant when he came on shift again a few days later.

When she returned north, Smith-Penniman stayed in touch with Clayvon, and followed her progress, hoping Sylvia would recover. But then one day her letters went unanswered. “I'll never know what happened, but I'm afraid the baby died. She was already brain damaged,” from severe malnourishment, she said.

“These people had no resources. No food stamps, no Medicaid, there was nothing to save this baby.”

Generalizing from her experience, Smith-Penniman said the Civil Rights movement “Strengthened our social conscience, so we could have things like WIC and Medicaid. The houses on Black Bottom probably have electricity now, the dirt road is paved.”

Smith-Penniman continued working with the civil rights movement in New York City, where she helped the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee with fundraising for the movement, counseling black men about draft deferments and conscientious refusal during the Vietnam War, working to achieve non-governmental organization status for African Americans at the United Nations, and organizing solidarity for black liberation movements in African nations emerging from colonialism.

In between raising a family of three children, Smith-Penniman was ordained as a Unitarian Minister, leading to a career at parishes in Concord and Petersham. She also found time for community ministry in the Boston area, working with women who were homeless, in prison, or illegal immigrants with a group called Women for Economic Justice and with the Women's Theological Center.

Now retired from the ministry, Smith-Penniman has divided her time between daily Buddhist meditation, occasional guest sermons, and completing her Doctorate of Ministry. “I try to stay active in Peace and Social Justice work,” she said. She serves on the board of the Western Massachusetts American Friends Service Committee, and also the New England Regional AFSC board.

Reflecting on the relevance of the Civil Rights movement for modern day America, she said if Reverend King were alive today, “He'd be horrified. Clearly he'd be speaking out against the war. Three thousand soldiers killed is 3,000 too many, not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqis.”

And, “He'd be terribly concerned about the growing divide between the rich and the poor.”

Smith-Penniman said the message of the civil rights movement is one of “Hope and persistance. It is critical to believe things can change. It is tremendously hard work; there are so many obstacles. But we have to try and try again, that's what is needed.”

Smith-Penniman moved to Wendell after her children began taking African dance lessons there. Though she herself has never been to Africa, she is looking forward to finally have the chance to do so this summer, when she will be attending a gathering of the African Diaspora at one of the old slave markets in Ghana.

A student of poetry during her college years, Smith-Penniman said she dreamed of lying on the beach in Senegal this summer and have someone read the poems of Leopold Senghor or Aimee Cesare to her.

Maybe this one, from Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906- 2001), poet, teacher, and president of Senegal from 1960 - 1981. Senghor coined the term 'negritude' which refers to identifying with one's 'blackness' without reference to culture, language, or geography.

Elegy For Martin Luther King (IV of V) (for jazz orchestra)

It was the fourth of April, nineteen hundred and sixty-eight,
A spring evening in a grey neighborhood, a district smelling
Of garbage mud where children played in the streets in spring,
And spring blossomed in the dark courtyards where blue murmuring
Streams played, a song of nightingales in the ghetto night of hearts.
Martin Luther King chose them, the motel, the district,
The garbage and the street sweepers, with the eyes of his heart in those
Spring days, those days of passion wherever the mud of flesh
Would have been glorified in the light of Christ.
It was the evening when light is clearest and air sweetest,
Dusk at the heart's hour, and its flowering of secrets
Mouth to mouth, of organ and of hymns and incense.
On the balcony now haloed in crimson where the air
Is more limpid, Martin Luther stands speaking pastor to pastor:
"My Brother, do not forget to praise Christ in his resurrection
And let his name be praised!"
And now opposite him, in a house of prostitution, profanation,
And perdition, yes, in the Lorraine Motel - Ah, Lorraine, ah
Joan, the white and blue woman, let our mouths purify you
Like rising incense!--In that evil house of tomcats and pimps
A man stands up, a Remington rifle in his hands.
James Earl Ray sees the Reverend Martin Luther King,
Through his telescopic sight, sees the death of Christ: "My brother,
Do not forget to magnify Christ in his resurrection this evening!"
Sent by Judas, he watches him, for we have made the poor into wolves
Of the poor. He looks through his telescopic sight, sees only the tender
Neck so black and beautiful. He hates that golden voice modulating
The angels' flutes, the voice of bronze trombone that thunders on terrible
Sodom and on Adama. Martin looks ahead at the house in front, he sees
The skyscrapers of light and glass, He sees curly, blond heads, dark,
Kinky heads full of dreams like mysterious orchids, and the blue lips
And the roses sing in a chorus like a harmonious organ.
The white man looks hard and precise as steel. James Earl aims
And hits the mark, shoots Martin, who withers like a fragrant flower
And falls. "My brother, praise His Name clearly, may our bones
Exult in the Resurrection!"