Leary at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Richmond. (Photo by Dominic Hernandez)
A veteran pastor and longtime Richmond resident, the Rev. James E. Leary wasn’t a close confidant of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but he was on the front lines of the movement. He participated in civil rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama; the 1963 March on Washington; the Albany Movement campaign against segregation in Albany, Georgia; and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, King’s final protest action.
The 82-year-old interim pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church says he was just a foot soldier in the movement, but that position gave him a vantage point that few shared.
Leary met King when he was a history student at Albany State University in Georgia in 1964 and the young minister came to town to lead a civil rights protest.
“That was my first time,” Leary says, recalling his entry into the civil rights movement. “He was trying to crack the system there, but he was unsuccessful.”
King would find greater challenges and successes in the years that followed. One of the pivotal moments occurred in Selma, when approximately 600 marchers advocating for voting rights, led by King and others, were confronted by violent policemen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Leary, then a 26-year-old college student (an Air Force stint delayed his enrollment), never made it onto the bridge where the clash occurred. He says a promise he made to his mother never to go to jail kept him outside the fray.
“I did march up to the bridge — by the time the police got to the section where I was, I had retreated back to the hotel,” he recalls. “I told Dr. King that I was not going to be able to let white people hit on me without responding … if I had responded to them, I would’ve gone to jail, or to the graveyard.”
Leary would meet King a few more times as he continued to be involved in the fight for civil rights, including once at King’s home in Georgia, when he witnessed the Nobel Prize winner eating collard greens without utensils. “He was just a human being,” Leary says. “He was not one that sought to elevate himself to be an idol, or anything like that.”
Leary did have aspirations to join King’s inner circle. While attending Andover Newton Theological School in Boston, he was part of a group that brought the minister to a fundraising concert sponsored by entertainer Harry Belafonte. Leary waited for an opportunity to make his case.
“I had a chance to talk with him in, of all places, in the men’s room. I shared with him that I was graduating from seminary that following May, and I wanted to … be one of his lieutenants, so to speak,” he says. “And he persuaded me not to [do] so, to stay in the pulpit.”
It wasn’t what Leary wanted to hear, and it stung. But, he says, “I followed his advice, and I stayed in the pulpit, graduated and went to Richmond.”
In Richmond, Leary would become pastor of St. Paul’s Baptist Church in 1969, remaining in that role for 14 years. Over the decades, he has reflected on King’s rebuff.
“Dr. King, I believe, always wanted to be a pastor. And he found himself a civil rights leader,” Leary says. “I think it was seeing in me pastoral potential and wanting me to do my best in the pulpit. I still supported him any way I could.”
He also helped make sure King’s work was never forgotten. In 1971, as president of the Black Churchmen of Richmond, he initiated one of the country’s first Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebrations.
When asked how King’s words speak to today’s times, he doesn’t hesitate to share his perspective, and it’s not the hopeful vision that people often ascribe to the civil rights leader, who was assassinated in 1968 at age 39.
“I think he was a prophet,” Leary says. “King predicted that we had the choice to become a community or chaos. I think we’re in the chaotic place now, especially politically.”
Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
Jan. 15-21, VCU Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Week: Programs, events and a dinner in honor of the civil rights leader. His son, Martin Luther King III, is the keynote speaker on Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. 804-828-8947 or mlkday.vcu.edu
Jan. 12, 40th Annual Community Leaders Breakfast: Congressman Donald McEachin is the keynote speaker at this long-running event held at the Marriott Hotel at 7:30 a.m. $40 to $10,000. 500 E. Broad St. 804-342-3938 or vuu.edu
