Paul Booth went on to serve two terms on Cincinnati City Council. He treasures the autograph he received from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964.
On the evening of April 4,1968,13-year-old Paul Booth was in his family house on Dury Avenue in Avondale. He was finishing homework he had as an eighth-grader at Samuel Ach Middle School.
The memories burn brightly – even 50 years later for Paul Booth, now 63 and division manager of the city of Cincinnati’s Office of Human Relations.
Paul’s father, the late Rev. Lavaughn Venchael (L. V.) Booth, the pastor of Avondale’s Zion Baptist Church, came home from work and called the family together to watch the grainy black-and-white television.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed by an assassin’s bullet while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The Booth family was close to King. The elder Booth in 1961 had founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which gave a denominational home to King and his platform for human and civil rights.
King visited Cincinnati and Zion Baptist, in particular, several times during his public life.
That night, April 4, though, the elder Booth spoke to his family of the void that King’s death would create.
“My father said, `This is a real tragedy for our nation and the black community. Dr. King had fully prepared himself for his death.’ “
Paul Booth, at 13, said he “felt sad.… People cried for days and days. I remember watching the speech Bobby Kennedy gave that night in Indianapolis in the black community, when he told people that King had been killed.”
Booth went to bed that night thinking about the evening, when he was 10, that he met King in the family’s dining room.
King had spoken twice that Sunday, Nov. 22,1964, at Zion Baptist on the event of its 122nd anniversary. King spoke first to church youths and then at the 10:45 a.m. service.
That evening, 10-year-old Paul was already in his pajamas when King and Andrew Young, a King confidant and executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, visited the Dury Avenue house.
“They were on their way to the airport and stopped by the house for a bite to eat,” Paul said. His mother, Georgia Booth, served a fruitcake.
“Dr. King did not like fruitcake,” Paul Booth said. His father introduced him by name to King and Young.
“My father said, `You might want to get his autograph,’ ” Paul Booth said. “I ran and got a scrap of paper. My father said I needed to get a book for Dr. King to sign. So I ran and got a book on the life of Jesus that my father had given me.
“Dr. King very graciously signed my book with a personal message.”
“He spoke in a slow drawl. I knew something of his greatness. He was very warm,” said Booth, the youngest of five children.
Earlier that afternoon at Zion, King had noticed neighborhood children shooting baskets on a paved court at the church. King removed his jacket, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He shot baskets and talked with the men and boys on the church playground.
“It goes to show you who he was,” Paul Booth said. “He had that human touch. He didn’t allow fame to take it from him.”
King, who had been in Cincinnati in September 1964 for a speech at Music Hall, was making a few stops that November with key U. S. supporters before flying to Europe. He received the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway. King would first stop in London for three days and preach at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Paul Booth’s awareness of King and his international significance would grow as he did.
Booth would graduate in 1972 from Woodward High School in Bond Hill and enroll in Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically important African-American, all-male liberal arts school that was King’s undergraduate alma mater.
L. V. Booth visited Atlanta regularly. He was a founding board member of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and worked closely with King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and King’s parents.
Paul Booth became involved as an advisory board member at the King Center. At Morehouse, he got to know the Rev. Benjamin Mays, the Morehouse president from 1940 through 1967 and to whom King referred as his “spiritual and intellectual mentor.”
During those years, Paul Booth realized the personal impact that King’s life and legacy had on him.
“In addition to my father, King was someone whose life I wanted mine to mirror,” he said. “Service and serving others became paramount to me.”
Booth moved back to Cincinnati and went to work in the property management department at Zion Baptist. His father had built hundreds of low-income housing units and a church-run nursing home near the church on Glenwood Avenue.
Booth went on to serve as a congressional aide to David Mann and two terms on Cincinnati City Council. He also was president of the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP in the 1980s.
Booth and his wife, Cynthia, have two sons. The first, the Rev. Paul Booth Jr., is 35. The Booths had a second boy in 1990; they named him Martin, in King’s honor.
Paul Booth Sr. thinks frequently about King and the leader’s place in today’s America.
On the 50th anniversary of King’s death, Booth said, “My main reflection is how we have to dedicate ourselves to his legacy and keep his work going. As a nation, we are not where we should be and where Dr. King envisioned us to be.
“When I think about the fact that he willingly and almost knowingly gave his life for the rights of others – and for civil rights, in general – it is incumbent on us, our duty, our obligation, to take that baton and pass it from generation to generation.”
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