(King, Martin Luther, Jr.) Montgomery, Ala. Telephone Directory, June 1955. [Place of publication not identified]: Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1955. Original pictorial stiff card wrappers printed in black and yellow with toning to the extremities, minor creasing to the front wrapper, a short closed tear to both front and back wrappers and a clipped lower fore corner to the back wrapper for what is still a very respectable copy of a directory which was meant to be handled and consulted on a regular basis. [iii], [4]-113, [vii], [3]-241, [3] pp. The first part of the book contains the following: "Montgomery, Ala. Alphabetical Telephone Directory" on pp. [4]-110; "Ft. Deposit, Ala. Alphabetical Telephone Directory" on pp. 111-112; "Hope Hull, Ala. Area Alphabetical Telephone Directory" on p. 113. The second part of the book contains: "Yellow Pages, Classified Directory, Montgomery, Ala."
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is listed twice in this directory; once on p. 56 of the Alphabetical Directory under his last name as follows: "King, M. L. Rev, 309 S Jackson" and a second time on p. 45 of the Yellow Pages, Classified Telephone Directory within the section "Churches -- Baptist" under Dexter Ave Baptist Church where Dr. King was called to be a minister in 1954. This listing reads: "M. L. King Jr -- Minister, 454 Dextr Av" along with two phone numbers, one evidently for the church office and another, listed as being for the "Parsonage," repeats the number listed for Dr. King in the alphabetical directory.
On December 5, 1955, just four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus, a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to nearly 5,000 people at the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) meeting at Holt Street Church in Montgomery. "In his speech, King described the mistreatment of black bus passengers, and the civil disobedience of Rosa Parks, and then justified the nonviolent protest by appealing to African-American Christian faith in love and justice and the American democratic tradition of legal protest." -- Stanford University, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, online details of Dr. King's MIA speech. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the most prolific spokesman of the civil rights movement. The condition of the directory is VERY GOOD. A RARE AND IMPORTANT TELEPHONE DIRECTORY published a few months before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would change the world. # 001241