(Music) I shall not, I shall not be moved.

I shall not.

I shall not be moved (Music).

Dr.

King was involved in the Civil Rights Movement by the time he first visited Pittsburgh in 1958.

He was recognized nationally as one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

We must remember that the decade of the 1950s, you had the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you had the Brown versus Board of Education decision on the Supreme Court, and those things kind of fueled the Civil Rights movement.

So Dr.

King was invited to come speak at Central Baptist Church in the Hill District by Reverend Cornell Talley, who himself was sort of a civil rights leader in Pittsburgh, going back to the late 1930s.

And so King's appearance in 1958 really was signaling that Pittsburgh was on the civil rights landscape.

(Music) There's a ladder that rises up, rises up to the Lord (Music).

- Then there were the Freedom Jubilees that were held at Forbes Field, which people primarily associated with sport, tell us about those events and what they were designed to do.

- Again, Reverend Talley was the brain trust behind what became the Freedom Jubilees.

The first one that took place at Forbes Field in 1960 attracted around 18,000 people, and they had celebrities because a lot of black celebrities were part of the Civil Rights Movement.

Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Count Basie, you know, and a number of others.

(Music) And they all came for this jubilee.

It was looked upon as sort of a precursor to the August, 1963 March on Washington as a way to sort of bring a massive crowds together to hear the message of the Civil Rights movement, especially Dr.

King.

- Why were the Freedom Jubilees held in Pittsburgh?

What was the purpose of moving those kinds of conversations from the south to the north?

- So you had all of these different activities taking place and being planned by civil rights activists, and then you had this large sort of gathering at Forbes Field to kind of discuss and to promote those things.

So it was a way of saying, you know, let's see what our support is around Pittsburgh, although people came from all over to attend, but it really, again, put Pittsburgh on the civil rights landscape.

(Music) (Music) Pittsburgh had its own issues to address in terms of civil rights.

Well, I would say maybe the three top issues was housing, employment, and jobs, and it was public accommodations.

The ironic thing is that the Freedom Jubilee was held at Forbes Field.

Forbes Field still operated with sort of segregated seating for baseball games and other events.

Black people had to sit in certain sections of the stadium, you know, so these types of ironies all coming together.

And so it really showed that in Reverend Talley's thinking that Pittsburgh needs to address its own civil rights issues.

This is not just a southern thing.

It's a thing that also impacts cities in the North as well.

- Was there a core message in what Dr.

King spoke about?

- I think his core message was really this whole thing about America living up to its promises.

(Music) You'll find that in his March on Washington speech.

As a matter of fact, when you look at Dr.

King, what he said in 1963 at the March on Washington, he said some of the same thing in at the Freedom Jubilee in 1960.

The Reverend Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Is still important today because we still live with the same conditions in America that he lived with in the fifties and sixties, and learning and understanding his struggle, we can only learn how to deal with the things that we are, we are faced with today, - The - Respect we won when our course was right, you know, everything from housing, from racial discrimination, gender discrimination, political discrimination, you know, all these, these factors that are impacting us today on a daily basis.

We really need to look at what Dr.

King and his generation did in order to attack the same type of conditions.

I think it's a great lesson.

(Music)