Miracle on 34th Street: How Louis Coleman became 'our Dr. King' in Louisville
The way Mattie Jones sees it, the Rev. Louis Coleman Jr. is in the heavens above, starting his day with God in the same way he would start his early ones with her. For more than a decade, Jones knew Buster − as the reverend was lovingly called − would ring her phone by 6 a.m., asking what was on the day's agenda.
The day before his death on July 5, 2008, the two had spent the entire Fourth of July holiday in her home, making plans for their next fight.
“He’s probably sitting around God’s throne and probably trying to get him to organize something,” Jones said the day after his death, when she cried outside her home, just up from what was 34th Street but is now named after Coleman.
Among his countless contributions are those he made while working up and down 34th Street in Louisville's West End - preaching from corners to those who did and perhaps did not want to listen. His impact along that path and throughout Kentucky has been described as miraculous. It was fitting the street's name reflected that, his supporters agreed.
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In late November, Jones sat in her living room and pointed to the sign bearing her late friend's name. "He was there 365 days a year," she said.
A first responder to injustice
Coleman was 64 years old when he died, and it was his relentless work that many said contributed to his untimely passing. He put his calling before his health, Jones and many others said.
Coleman's inspiration was rooted in his upbringing in Louisville's Rubbertown neighborhood, where he witnessed the travesties of segregation and its lasting impacts. One of his most significant accomplishments was his fight for environmental justice for Rubbertown's residents. His complaints about smokestack emissions eventually revealed excessive levels of chemicals in the air and prompted a stringent toxic-air control program throughout Jefferson County.
The diversity of fights he'd take on throughout his life, though, were far-reaching.
"Anywhere where racism would raise up his ugly head he would be there," Jones said.
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Coleman is credited with helping minority subcontractors get work on some of Louisville's largest construction projects. He is said to have hosted one of the city's first gun buyback programs − an effort to reduce reckless deaths. He helped secure an agreement by the Professional Golfers' Association to increase minority participation in the sport. And he helped form the city's first Black Chamber of Commerce. He also hosted school supply drives, and he founded the Justice Resource Center.
"Louis ran himself ragged holding press conferences about one issue or another, leading daily vigils outside crack houses and picketing City Hall, police headquarters and job sites, where he didn’t believe that minorities were getting their fair share of the work or the contracts," Courier Journal columnist Betty Winston Baye wrote in 2008.
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Simply committed
When people speak of Coleman's commitment, it isn't just in terms of the doctors appointments he'd skip at the last minute, prioritizing an unexpected call to action instead. They talk about his intense focus − his lack of interest in the unnecessary.
"He stuck his nose into everything he could stick his nose into relative to helping the social justice of Black people," said Kathleen Parks, founder of the Louisville chapter of the National Action Network, a civil rights organization. With his "hooptie van and rundown tennis shoes," she said, Coleman represented the image of a man "who cared more about the movement and the people he served than he did himself. He was selfless."
Parks, who met Coleman when she was a little girl, recalled Coleman's commitment to the West End and particularly to 34th Street.
"The street preaching was significant because he was able to connect with a lot of the gang bangers and the street people," she said. "People who would be walking down the street, he would pray with them and he would talk about issues impacting west Louisville."
Coleman's loss, she said, was "tremendous."
"Rev. Louis Coleman was very much our Dr. King here in Louisville," she said.
"'We're going to agitate, agitate and agitate until justice falls down,'" Parks recalled was one of Coleman's favorite Martin Luther King Jr.'s quotes.
More than a decade after Coleman's death, she and Jones found themselves wondering how his presence could have helped the city in the aftermath of Breonna Taylor's killing by Louisville police.
"We need more mentors today," Parks said.
Coleman, Jones said, believed in King's vision of a beloved community and he was committed to working toward creating it.
"He never compromised the community or the quality and the justice of how human beings are supposed to live," she said.
She fears not enough people today understand that struggle and the power of their vote.
"We see the names of Rev. Coleman and others who have made an impact on this community, but our young folks can’t relate to it," Jones said. "Our history and our struggle should be a part of the school system so when they see these names ... they can know what these people have done."
Contact reporter Krista Johnson at kjohnson3@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: How civil rights advocate Louis Coleman became Louisville's Dr. King