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Signed book: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. First edition. NY: Harper & Brothers, 1958. Hardcover with dust jacket, 5.75 x 8.25, 230 pages. Signed and inscribed on the first free end page in blue ballpoint, “To: Mr. Ellis Marsalis, With best wishes and warm personal regards, Martin L. King, Jr.” Autographic condition: fine, with a bookstore stamp at the bottom of the signed page. Book condition:
Ellis Louis Marsalis Sr. (1908–2004) was a New Orleans businessman and civil rights activist who transformed a riverside barn into the Marsalis Mansion Motel, a safe, upscale haven for Black travelers who were barred from white-owned hotels during segregation. In the 1950s and 60s, the motel became an important gathering place for leading civil rights figures, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., providing them with lodging, privacy, and a base of operations while traveling in the South. Marsalis’s relationship to King evolved over time—he initially viewed him skeptically but, after reading his writings, came to see him as a brilliant and transformative leader.
Marsalis’s son and namesake, jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, Jr., confirmed King’s stay at the motel in a 2017 interview: ‘Well there were lots of people who stayed in there. Martin Luther King stayed once. Ray Charles and the band used to stay there. BB King. Dinah Washington did. She stayed there because…there was no other place that was around except people in their homes that would house musicians coming through town, because there was no place for them to stay. I think in the peak years he had nine people working.’
Published in 1958, King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, chronicles the planning, events, and aftermath of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolent resistance, the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. A comprehensive and insightful account, the book traces the journey of a community and highlights King's transformative devotion to equality and non-violence.
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