Long before making national headlines from the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the March on Washington during the Civil Rights movement, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for Black people’s rights to space, presence, and autonomy. According to Barbara Leap at NJMonthly, King participated in his first sit-in at Mary’s Cafe while still a seminary student in New Jersey.
There, he, a classmate, Walter McCall, and their dates, Doris Wilson and Pearl Smith, sat and waited for a long time before the cafe’s white gun-toting owner chased them out. We can assume this experience taught Dr. King to put his physical body on the line to forcibly take up space—an idea that gestated to become the crux of King’s nonviolent campaign. Though lawfully relegated to the backs of buses and routinely denied service at white establishments, many Black folks like Dr. King, Claudette Colvin, and Rosa Parks dared to remain in their places.
At The SoulFolk Collective, we channel the spirit of Dr. King’s spatial rebellion as we imagine with our community how we can create more space here in Madison for our Blackness. Inspired by Victor Hugo Green’s 1936 Negro Motorist Green Book, our Black Madison Archive oral history project documents how Black residents of Madison carry on Dr. King’s legacy. In our forthcoming paper on how Black Madison residents co-create Black-affirming enclaves that are inclusive of the depth and complexity of the Black experience, we are seeing—coincidentally or not—that the Metro transit bus and local restaurants are spaces that Black Madison residents associate with Black excellence and culture. Though not the focus of our paper, we would be remiss not to mention these reverberations of present day Black folks finding spatial sanctuaries in the very places where Dr. King learned the power of taking up space.
The past decade has witnessed Americans become more connected and more isolated in previously unimaginable ways with the explosion of the internet, a years-long global pandemic, and a seemingly endless stream of misinformation and apathy on social media. In 1965, Dr. King told the graduates of Oberlin College that he believed in the possibility of a geographic oneness of the world, arguing that due to modern technologies, “we’ve made of this world a neighborhood…and now through our moral and ethical commitment must make of it a brotherhood.” Nearly sixty years later, with political division in America yawning ever wider, King’s reminder that “anyone who feels that we can live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution” echoes loud in our ears. The SoulFolk Collective aims to use our digital spaces to not only document our own stories, but also grapple with these ethical commitments of more liberatory futures. With the opening of our SoulFolk Saturday School in January 2027, we hope to create more space here in Madison for Black togetherness, for the siblinghood Dr. King called for.
Hope Kelham is the photographer and editor for The SoulFolk Collective.
Information on the Mary’s Cafe Sit-In comes from the Stanford University Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute’s “Chronology” of Dr. King’s life, and from “Martin Luther King Junior’s Civil Rights Career Began at a Modest NJ Cafe,” Barbara Leap, NJMonthly.
Quotation comes from Oberlin College Archives on the Commencement Address called “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” given in June 1965.
