Mary’s Café, originally located at the clover leaf overpass intersection of Route 73 and Main Street, Maple Shade is now closed, defunct and owned by the State. It was the place where Martin Luther King’s attitude on civil rights changed, and thus changed America. The incident occurred when King was attending Crozier Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. King was driving around that warm Sunday morning with another Crozier student, Walter R. McCall, and their dates, Pearl Smith and Doris Wilson. They stopped at Mary’s café in Maple Shade, where they were refused service by the proprietor, Ernest Nichols.
When they were refused service, and they refused to leave, Nichols apparently pulled a pistol from behind the bar, stepped to the door and fired the gun in the air. That was enough and King and his party left, but Walter McCall went looking for a policeman and filed a complaint against Nichols, resulting in his arrest. Although there were three other patrons, witnesses there at the time, one reportedly black, they refused to testify and the charges were dismissed, but not before Nichols’ lawyer, W. Thomas McGann, entered Nichols’ statement into the record.
The incident, while not widely known or published, is often cited as a key spark to Martin Luther King’s radicalism, instigating his civil activism and the beginning of his attempts to achieve civil rights across a broader spectrum. It is mentioned in most chronologies of civil rights actions in the United States, and is mentioned in most accounts.
