MLK to Lead Boston March

Apr. 22, 1965 - Dr. Martin Luther King brought his civil rights crusade north today to the cradle of the 19th-century abolitionist movement.

Dr. King, who will lead a march in Boston tomorrow, addressed a joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature this afternoon after a full day of appearances throughout the city. He spoke briefly in the morning at the State House with Governor John Volpe.

From the time he landed at the Boston Airport until he finished speaking at a Passover service at Temple Israel, Dr. King was protected by a detail of 350 police at strategic points. A motorcycle escort followed him as his limousine moved from place to place.

Dr. King’s remarks to the Legislature followed the theme that he has preached throughout the South — that it is false to believe that time will solve the problems of segregation or that legislation cannot put an end to it.

The Negro leader told an audience of several hundred at St. John’s Roman Catholic Seminary that Christian and Jewish clergy, as “moral guardians” of their people, had a basic responsibility to take a stand on the side of ending segregation.

Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, who is convalescing from major abdominal surgery, issued a statement welcoming Dr. King to Boston. The prelate asserted that “what we must learn above all else is that each Negro is a man like ourselves, wanting the same good things that we want and have, suffering the same sorrows, with some added which are uniquely his own.”In reply to a question, Dr. King said he had no objection to civil rights supporters taking part in demonstrations protesting United States participation in Vietnam. He asserted that civil rights and peace movements were inextricably associated.

“It is nice to be able to drink milk at an integrated lunch counter,” he said, “but it is not good to drink milk that has strontium 90 in it.”

Dr. King came to Boston as a tense movement in the civil rights movement. A recent report studying Massachusetts schools found that Boston and three other cities had serious racial imbalances in their public schools.

Among its recommendations, a special commission suggested mass transfer of pupils by bus between neighborhood schools to achieve better racial balance.

Today, Dr. King toured the heavily Negro district of Roxbury, where he saw some of the schools and tenements that rights leaders have branded as substandard. More than 70% of the state’s 80,000 Negroes live in Roxbury.

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