In 1962, Orlando’s Rev. Curtis Jackson invited Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Orlando, and although King could not attend then, he came in the spring of 1964 after leading the 10,000-person March for Freedom in Philadelphia on March 5th with Jackie Robinson. The next day, King arrived in Orlando to lead an all-day conference at Shiloh Baptist Church in Parramore, where he met with the NAACP Youth Council, pastors, and other local leaders. That evening, despite unseasonably cold and windy weather, a crowd of 2,000 gathered at Tinker Field to hear him speak, with many in the grandstands and others assembled on the field around him as he spoke from the pitcher’s mound. A local newspaper observed that only 10-15 people in the large audience were white. King declared that “segregation is on its deathbed and the only question now is how expensive it’s funeral will be because of the segregationist.” Although an earlier weather forecast had nearly moved the gathering to the Fairgrounds at Exposition Park, the event at Tinker Field, called the birthplace of integration in Orlando, became a poetic continuation of Orlando’s journey toward equality. The same infield where Dandridge, Irving, Coleman, Paula and Robinson had marked Orlando’s first steps toward an integrated society became hallowed ground in the city’s civil rights history. In March 1968, only days before his assassination, King told Don Newcombe that he would never know how much he and Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and Roy Campanella had made King’s work easier through what they had done on the baseball field.
