Race against time to save MLK home in Camden

CAMDEN - The home still is  blighted and boarded up, the block still has addicts and drug dealers wandering its sidewalk, and the street itself still is pocked with potholes.

But the gray row house on Walnut Street in South Camden has a unique place in our nation's history, activists insist, as they continue their effort to preserve the home where they say civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed during a formative time in his life.

On a gray March morning with the clouds and sun fighting for space in the sky, Patrick Duff, Father Michael Doyle and Colandus "Kelly" Francis met a Courier-Post reporter and photographer in front of 753 Walnut St. to talk about their hopes for the home, citing a 1981 news story about King's visits to Camden between 1948 and 1951.

"In those days, anyone was welcome in this house," Benjamin Hunt, then 81 and the home's owner, told the Courier-Post 35 years ago. "It had what we called a swinging door. My cousin Walter (McCall) was King's friend and the two of them lived in the back room upstairs on and off for two years when they were in school" at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania.

"He got along just fine with everybody and fit in like one of the family," Benjamin Hunt said in 1981.

His daughter-in-law, Jeanette Lilly Hunt, still lives in Camden and is the owner of the home where she lived early in her marriage to one of Benjamin Hunt's seven children, Jesthroe Hunt. Jesthroe, a former city firefighter, died in 2006; the home had been rented by a woman and her disabled mother, but, Hunt said, she had to evict them for not paying rent.

"They didn't take care of the house," Jeanette Hunt said this week, estimating the home has been vacant for about 10 years. "Then the drug dealers came in and they did a job on it," removing radiators, pipes — anything of value.

Still, the home's real value, the activists say, is its connection to King, and its potential to teach Camden residents about their city's place in civil rights history.

"To think that we are breathing the air that he breathed," said Doyle, himself an icon in Camden for his decades of work at Sacred Heart Church.

"What a lift it would be to Camden for its people to know he lived here, had friends here, and had one of his first encounters with the tragedy of racism here."

The incident to which Doyle referred has been well documented: In 1950, King and McCall and two female companions went to Mary's Place, a now long-closed bar in Maple Shade. The bar's owner refused to serve them and asked them to leave; when they refused, the bar owner fired a gun into the air.

McCall called police; charges were later dropped but the complaint lists an address for King: 753 Walnut St., Camden.

Doyle noted King, while accustomed to the racism of the South, was taken aback by it in the North, which he considered more enlightened and progressive.

McCall, interviewed in 1970 by the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, called the incident "the first civil rights struggle that King had ever been in."

It would seem Benjamin Hunt agreed. "I always think that what happened to him that night may have started to change him into the leader he was," he told the Courier-Post in 1981.

The activists hoping to save the home have formed a coalition that includes the nonprofit Heart of Camden, Rutgers University-Camden's law school (which has offered, pro bono, to set up a 501(c)3 nonprofit to raise funds), Doyle and the Camden County NAACP.

The process has been protracted, as Duff and others have worked to build evidence that King lived on Walnut Street. Still, he's optimistic their work will bear fruit.

"Now that we have this coalition, I feel like the project will move forward more quickly," he said  last week.

Duff, an amateur historian from Haddon Heights, estimated it would take nearly $100,000 to rehabilitate the house, which has sections of its roof compromised and has an empty lot next door that Duff said the city agreed to donate, should efforts to preserve the home prove successful.

"Our histories are intertwined — Camden's and King's," said Francis, head of the Camden County chapter of the NAACP who grew up in the neighborhood and recalled it as a hotbed for South Jersey's civil rights activists and some of the city's most prominent residents.

Fixing the home, he believes, could help the neighborhood.

"It could be an impetus to restore the whole area," he said, adding it could be a suitable location for NAACP offices, educational facilities and a lasting monument to King's legacy in the city and elsewhere.

Those who knew King as a seminarian recalled a young man with a world of potential before him. McCall in his 1970 interview with the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, recalled the man he called "Mike" as someone with "a seriousness of purpose."

"He was smart and I just knew he was going to be a great man," Benjamin Hunt said in 1981.

Phaedra Trethan: (856) 486-2417; ptrethan@gannettnj.com