King at “The Pearl”

Call it a case of serendipity. Two local women who met in February 2015 collaborated to write and illustrate a children’s book about a very special visit to Portsmouth in 1952 by then Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. Lillian Buckley of New Hope Baptist Church in Portsmouth holds a painting that depicts Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit in 1952.

Tammi J. Truax of Eliot, Maine, and Rev. Lillian Buckley of New Hope Baptist Church worked on “The Pearl of Portsmouth: A Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” during the pandemic.

The former People’s Baptist Church in Portsmouth, known as “The Pearl,” hosted many distinguished visitors. One of them was a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached at the church on Oct. 26, 1952 while a doctoral student at Boston University. He gave a sermon titled, “Going Forward by Going Backward.”

“When I found out (King) came to Portsmouth, it bothered me,” says Truax, who wrote a children’s book about King visiting Portsmouth with his soon-to-be bride, Coretta Scott. (Scott, then a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, sang a solo in the choir during the service.)

“And it bothered me that my children never learned this history,” Truax says. “I did my own research and learned everything I could about this visit.”

“The Pearl” is located on the corner of Pearl and Hanover streets. Today it is a wooden building with stained glass windows, a curved staircase and a pink steeple. Built in 1857, the building was New Hampshire’s first Black church. In 1915, the congregation of People’s Baptist Church purchased the building for $1,200.

The church dissolved in 1968 after the congregation had separated earlier into two groups. One of them, New Hope Baptist Church, acquired the title to the building and remained its owner until 1984, when it was sold to facilitate building a new church on Peverly Hill Road.

Truax has worked as a teacher in a variety of settings from preschool to prison, always with an emphasis on literacy. She completed graduate work in Italy and the United States, earning a master’s in education in library media studies.

She is also the author of “For to See the Elephant,” a novel in verse. She is Portsmouth’s 12th Poet Laureate (2019-2022) and a Maine Beat Poet Laureate (2018-2021.)

Truax said she learned of young Rev. King’s visit while reading “Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage” by Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham.

Cunningham dedicated her life’s work to researching three centuries of African-American heritage in her hometown. As a teenager growing up in Portsmouth, Cunningham was proud of her family’s African-American heritage, but she was also curious about local Black history.

While working at Portsmouth Public Library, an after-school job she held in the 1950s, she discovered Charles W. Brewster’s “Rambles About Portsmouth.” There, she found clues to a history that until then had been invisible. She began a quest that would consume the rest of her life as a researcher, historian and chronicler of “Black Portsmouth” from 1645 to present day.

Cunningham led efforts to establish the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail with the installation of 24 bronze historic site markers all around Portsmouth. One of them is located at 45 Pearl St.

So, a seed was born in Truax’s mind to tell the story of King’s visit to Portsmouth, her hometown at the time.

“I sat on it for a while and tried to think of how to illustrate the story,” she says.

In February 2015, Truax was a columnist for the Portsmouth Herald and interviewed Buckley in Kittery, Maine.

“I honestly don’t remember how I found her for my column,” Truax says. “I used to keep my eye and ear alert for good interviews back in those days. Lillian is an artist, a musician and had a very spiritual upbringing.”

While sitting in Buckley’s living room, Truax noticed a painting on a wall that captured her attention. She doesn’t recall what the painting was, only that it was strikingly colorful.

“I told Lillian about my book and asked a few years later if she could illustrate it,” Truax says, making a choice of the best artist to illustrate her children’s book.

“I was working on some projects during the COVID lockdown, and this was also Lillian’s COVID lockdown project,” Truax says. “It made a huge difference in her life to do that during COVID, I think.”

Buckley says she began working on the artwork in January 2020. She did one illustration a month working in pencil, pen and acrylic.

“When Tammi asked me to illustrate her book, I was thrilled,” Buckley recalls. “It was a joyful venture about a family I respect who were proud to give their message.”

There is so much injustice in this country, Buckley says.

“One little stone can make a ripple and then concentric ripples,” Buckley says. “As Dr. King said, ‘We’re all in this together.’ This is a small part in getting this message out to children.”

Buckley’s family moved from Mississippi to Kittery in 1957 when her father began working at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. She was born at the shipyard a few years later, the youngest of four children.

After graduating from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1981 with a major in art and a minor in English, Rev. Buckley worked for the Department of Defense at the shipyard before she was transferred to the former Pease Air Force Base. She held various positions in the U.S. Postal Service, the last being a management position in Boston in 1995.

“When I was about 20, I had a spiritual calling to become a minister,” Buckley says.

She attended the Harvard Divinity School from 1990 to 1997 and earned a master’s degree in divinity. In 2007, she started a doctor of ministry program in homiletics from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and graduated in 2010 from the Hamilton, Mass., theology school.

Buckley was ordained in 1997 at the Middle Street Baptist Church, and served as the pastor for Bow Lake Free Will Baptist Church in Strafford for 14 years and the First Baptist Church in Exeter for four years. She also served as an interim pastor at several churches and is currently the interim minister at New Hope Baptist Church.

“Dr. King and Coretta Scott King were dynamic bridge-builders and truth-tellers,” Buckley says. “Though gone too soon, their contributions still resonate with anyone whose lives they changed.”

Truax’s story begins with the country’s segregation, and tells of Rev. King’s visit to Portsmouth, and the Kings’ life work devoted to ending the separation of the citizens of every state.

Buckley’s favorite illustration in “The Pearl” is of Dr. and Mrs. King as newlyweds that depicts a timeline of their life together spanning Boston; Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Memphis, Tennessee.

“It shows how short their time together was while showing the great potential they had to be great world leaders,” she says. “They were the brightest and the best, but yet their lights were snuffed out early on due to simple-minded hatred embedded in our culture.”

Buckley attended People’s Baptist Church as a young child, so she says, “in many ways, this story is my story.”

(Editor’s note: “The Pearl of Portsmouth: A Story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” was published in 2022 by Piscataqua Press. It was a finalist for the Judges’ Award for Children’s Literature and won the People’s Choice Award by the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.)

This article is featured in the spring 2024 issue of 603 Diversity.

603 Diversity’s mission is to educate readers of all backgrounds about the exciting accomplishments and cultural contributions of the state’s diverse communities, as well as the challenges faced and support needed by those communities to continue to grow and thrive in the Granite State.

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