Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday that Arkansas has recognized as a standalone holiday only since 2017. This is despite it being a federal holiday since the 1980s. Arkansas had previously split the federal holiday so people could choose to commemorate King or Confederate general and slaveowner Robert E. Lee.

No records exist showing any significant trips by Lee to Arkansas, but King did visit. Twice — in 1958 and 1963. 

Mosaic Templars Cultural Center highlighted King’s two trips to the Natural State in guided tours they hosted on Monday at their museum in downtown Little Rock.

Historian Brian Rodgers told attendees that King first visited on May 27, 1958, to be the graduation keynote speaker at what was then called Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College, or AM&N. It is now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. UAPB is Arkansas’s only public historically Black university.

King, who had recently gained increased international attention as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement after the success of the 1955 bus boycott he led in Montgomery, Alabama, challenged students to resist racial segregation and discrimination everywhere. This is the first and only time he spoke at a college in Arkansas. Around 1,000 people came to see King speak that day.

“He also encouraged them to … ‘not go out to be a good Negro — go out to be a good man’ and ‘compete with people, not’ other Black people,” Rodgers said, quoting partially from King’s speech that day.

In September, the Arkansas Times published an in-depth article about that 1958 visit and the political battle over it. White state legislators feared King’s visit, saying that he would stir up trouble among Black and white people. But regardless of lawmakers’ supposed fears, trouble had already started up. Just the year before, Little Rock gained international attention when nine Black teenagers integrated Central High School, no easy feat as then-Gov. Orval Faubus had called in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering. An angry mob of white people harassed the students, now known to history as the Little Rock Nine. Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s public high schools in 1958 rather than follow federal school desegregation orders after Brown v. Board of Education.

King recognized the significance of the Little Rock Nine’s struggle, and he honored them by traveling up to Little Rock from Pine Bluff a few hours after his keynote speech to attend Ernest Green’s graduation ceremony on the same day. Green was the first of the Little Rock Nine to graduate from Central High and the first Black person ever to graduate from the school, making history that day.

King kept his visit low key, mixing in with the crowd of around 4,500 people who came to watch at Central High’s Quigley Stadium. It is reported that Green and his classmates didn’t know King came to the graduation until it was over. Mosaic Templars keeps a picture of King, Green and Bates meeting and talking that day.

King gave Green a $15 check as a graduation present, the latter recalled to the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2018. Green, 84, is still alive.

Rodgers said that King spent time with Green at the home of civil rights icon Daisy Bates, which served as a safe organizing place for the Little Rock Nine in the 1950s. Bates was the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Arkansas chapter and was crucial to helping the students.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS: Martin Luther King Jr. with Ernest Green, the first black graduate of a desegregated Little Rock High School and Daisy Bates, the NAACP leader of the desegregation effort.

Rodgers then guided attendees to a 1963 copy of The Washington Afro-American, a Black newspaper founded in the late 19th century, that the museum has on display.

The article was about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Bates was one of just two women allowed to speak at the march, and then only after a last minute request: The original speaker had gotten stuck in traffic, Rodgers said.

Attendees then were brought to look at a beautiful, heavy Bible from the late 1800s displayed in a case.

A Black Civil War veteran donated the Bible to First Missionary Baptist Church in the 1890s, where it served as the church’s official Bible until 1963, the year that King returned to Arkansas.

King came back to Little Rock at First Missionary Baptist Church Rev. Roland Smith’s invitation. It was the church’s 118th anniversary, and Smith had been King’s classmate at Morehouse College in Atlanta as well as another leader involved in the Civil Rights Movement. King came only a couple of months before the legendary March on Washington.

The Bible MLK used when he delivered a sermon at First Missionary Baptist Church in Little Rock in 1963 Credit: Brian Chilson

While at the church, King used the Bible on display at Mosaic Templars on Monday. He delivered a version of his sermon, “A Knock at Midnight,” a somber warning that the world was headed toward destruction through endless war, and a challenge to ideas of ethical and moral neutrality.

King wasn’t allowed to stay in any Little Rock hotels due to Jim Crow laws in Arkansas, so he stayed in First Missionary Baptist’s parsonage. Rodgers said the church is currently working to restore the house to what it looked like when King stayed there.

After his visit, First Missionary Baptist put the Bible on display at the church but let Mosaic Templars have it for MLK Day. The church itself is part of Black history and Arkansas history. Founded by a former slave in the 19th century named Wilson Brown, the church celebrated its 180th anniversary last year.

Lastly, Mosaic Templars had an AI video display in which one could ask questions of King’s close friend and confidant, civil rights leader Andrew Young. Young was involved with King as the latter led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Young went on to become mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. At 93, he is still alive.

One can push down a button and ask the AI-generated Young, seated with a blue suit on, questions about King, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and more. He’ll even provide a hostile answer about Stokely Carmichael, who led SNCC after the departure of former U.S. Rep. John Lewis. Young sided with Lewis against Carmichael’s more radical calls for Black Power in the 1960s, which argued that the Civil Rights Movement didn’t go far enough to ensure Black people could live equitably in the United States.

A company named StoryFile interviewed Young and assembled his responses to make the AI video. An algorithm matches up keywords in visitors’ questions to pull up the appropriate answer. 

Mosaic Templars held the tour as an event for adults and kids. They normally do an annual MLK Challenge, where kids have the chance to participate in service projects in the name of MLK. As that event was being held in the museum, they hosted two guided tours where a few curious onlookers brought their children to learn more about the civil rights legend who was taken from this world far too early.