Martin Luther King Jr. challenged Oregonians 60 years ago to find a way to live together ‘or perish as fools’
Updated Jan 18, 2021;
Posted Jan 18, 2021
Mourners attend a memorial service in 1968 for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Vancouver Avenue Baptist Church. King had visited the church during a 1961 visit to Portland. (The Oregonian)Oregonian
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Martin Luther King Jr. had a powerful message to deliver when he visited Portland in 1961, one that continues to resonate 60 years later as the country experiences a surge in racist rhetoric and violence.
“We must learn to live together as brothers,” he told the crowd at downtown’s Civic Auditorium. “Or perish as fools.”
David Chapel s Pastor Joseph C. Parker Jr. (Photo by John Anderson)
David Chapel Missionary Baptist Church was born, phoenixlike, out of the darkness of Austin s racial history. The congregation originated in 1924, when members of a community then south of Austin, concerned about boys playing marbles on Sundays, established a church in a former blacksmith shop. They ve moved two times since: once in 1926 to the corner of 14th and Chestnut streets in East Austin, and again, as the church grew, to its current site at MLK and Chestnut in 1958.
With the second move, the church wanted to build a new sanctuary to accommodate its growing congregation, but white-owned banks refused to lend the money. Instead, David Chapel solicited funding from the St. John Regular Baptist Association (a coalition of churches in East Austin, still in existence) and hired John S. Chase – the first Black graduate of the UT-Austin School of Architecture – to design the sanctuary and Ol