Though 2,752 miles separate Montgomery, Ala., and Everett, they weren’t really all that far apart.
In the mid-1950s, a young, newly married pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, were settling into life in Montgomery and starting a family.
In Everett, Carl Gipson and his wife, Jodie, were doing the same thing at that time – trying to buy a home and start a life.
When Coretta Scott King, 78, died Tuesday, she was remembered as instrumental in her husband’s work, and for carrying on the cause when he was assassinated in 1968.
Though she was just a pastor’s wife in 1956, eventually she and her entire family – including her children – would become key in the ongoing national struggle for civil rights.
After her husband’s death, she lobbied to have a national day of remembrance for him. She founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, and continued to spread his message of peace and equality worldwide.
Carl Gipson, who couldn’t buy a house in 1956 because nobody would sell him one, would become Snohomish County’s first African American city councilman.
“The third one in the state,” he added, chuckling.
The civil rights movement was Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, but it was also Gipson. It wasn’t just millions of marchers and boycotts and speeches in Alabama or Washington, D.C., he said. It was local.
“When I came here to live, there was only about a handful of black folks that was here,” Gipson said Tuesday.
What was life like then?
“Hell,” Gipson said.
He was in the Navy, and first came to town in 1946 when he was stationed on Whidbey Island.
About a decade later when he got out of the Navy, realtors would only show the couple homes on streets where other black families lived.
When the Gipsons finally found a home, through a private party sale, some in the neighborhood went to the bank and tried to stop the loan.
On moving day, the guy in the front of the moving truck had a shotgun. So did Gipson and another fellow on the tailgate.
“People around here didn’t want their kids to play with our kids. My wife – I would tell her to put cookies out on the front steps,” Gipson said. “And toys. Next thing you know the (kids would) be running across the street. That’s how we broke down those kinds of things.”
By 1971, Gipson owned his own service station on Colby Avenue. One morning he left work for a few minutes to run down to the courthouse. He put his name on a City Council ballot. He beat out several others, and went on to serve 24 years on the council.
And he made the history books, including the recently published, “Snohomish County: An Illustrated History.”
“Page 368,” Gipson said.
Like Coretta Scott King, blazing a trail is all about finding your space, he said.
“You come in and you find your space, and you don’t impede on others,” Gipson said.
The Rev. Paul Stoot, pastor of Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, had dinner with Martin Luther King III last week when King came to speak at Edmonds Community College.
Stoot said the two spoke of King’s mother, Coretta Scott King, and how she was recovering from a stroke and mild heart attack she’d suffered in August.
On Tuesday afternoon, Stoot was looking into attending her memorial service.
“Mrs. King was the first lady of civil rights,” Stoot said. “That encompasses everybody in the whole wide world, across the country lines. She represents civil rights. She represents justice.”
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