Martin Luther King Jr.
Slept Here.

Ralph Mark Gilbert arrived in Savannah in 1939 as the new pastor of First African Baptist Church — one of the oldest Black churches in America, founded in 1775 before the Revolutionary War. He found a fully segregated city and did not accept it.

Within a year he had rebuilt the Savannah NAACP chapter from the ground up. He organized voter registration drives at a time when registering Black voters in Georgia was a dangerous act. Most importantly he trained a young man named Westley Wallace Law who would carry the work forward for fifty years.

He worked from the house at 611 West 36th Street. He planned strategy here. He prepared sermons here. When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Savannah he slept here — in the home of the man who had built the infrastructure of resistance that made everything possible.

Ralph Mark Gilbert died in 1956 — eight years before the Civil Rights Act. W.W. Law finished the work. The Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard carries his name. The house at 611 West 36th Street has no marker.