The Tablet January 8, 2021
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is pictured in an undated file photo. (Photo: Catholic News Service)
BEDFORD–STUYVESANT Brooklynites in the winter of 1963 got a preview of one of history’s most iconic moments the delivery several months later of the “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
On Feb. 10, 1963, the civil rights leader visited the historic Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, which, a century earlier, became a rallying center for the abolitionist movement and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Its first pastor, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, was a prominent abolitionist and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”