The job of secretary to a minister is generally not associated with any particular risk to life or limb. But there are exceptions. From an interview published in the Washington Post (and republished by the Chicago Tribune in 2015:

Four days later [after the bombing of Ralph Abernathy’s house], Montgomery Improvement Association leaders supplied the chief of the highway patrol with a “List of persons and churches most vulnerable to violent attacks.” King registered at the top. Mrs. Maude Ballou was No. 21.

“Maybe I didn’t have the sense to worry,” says Ballou, who later spent three decades as a college administrator and a middle and high school teacher in North Carolina. “I didn’t have time to worry about what might happen, or what had happened, or what would happen,” she says in the cadences of a Baptist minister. “We were very busy doing things, knowing that anything could happen, and we just kept going.”

One time a man came down from Birmingham. “He said the White Citizens’ Council had sent him down there to tell me to stop working for civil rights or they would get my children. And that’s what got me, when you think about your babies. That really shook me,” says Ballou, with considerable equanimity. “But it didn’t stop me.”

Another night, working late in the office, alone, “somebody was outside watching. They were outside there in the car. And I found out later it was the KKK. But I was not afraid, for some reason,” she says. “I was a daredevil, I guess.”

What was the Montgomery Improvement Association? The organization that organized the Montgomery bus boycotts.

Who was Number 21, Maude Ballou? Martin Luther King, Junior’s first secretary. She worked in that role from 1955 to 1960, handling King’s voluminous correspondence (including putting off Malcolm X), keeping his affairs in order, and helping to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office when King moved to Atlanta.

Ballou went on maternity leave in 1958, so Hilda Stewart Proctor, a niece of Harriet Tubman and active in other civil rights organizations, filled in for seven months. King clearly made an impression on her; later that year, after she had moved on to other work, she still offered to help with his correspondence prior to his trip to India:

If I do 100 letters between now and the time you leave for India that will peel down the pile a little won’t it?

AND I WOULD LIKE TO DO IT AS ANY FRIEND WOULD DO WHO IS INTERESTED IN GETTING YOU OFF TO INDIA. I shall donate my services to the cause.

Please do this. Of course, as usual, all your work will be held in the strictest confidence.

PLEASE LET ME HELP BECAUSE I STILL FEEL AS THOUGH I AM YOUR SECRETARY WITHOUT PORTFOLIO, SECRETARY AT LARGE, SECRETARY ON ‘MATERNITY’ LEAVE, not mine, of course.

King also had a significant effect on his final primary secretary, Dora McDonald, who worked for him from 1960 until his assassination in 1968. From a profile of her by Dudley Percy published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989:

Working for Dr. King was her political awakening. Unlike many of those who found themselves aligned with the movement, Miss McDonald did not initially join because of a deep-felt conviction. Dr. King sought her out when he moved back to Atlanta from Montgomery, Ala., to co-pastor his father’s church.

…

Once she agreed to join his staff, his spirit was contagious.

“After I got into my job, and what I was doing, what we were doing, and what the movement meant, I never wanted to be doing something else. I was a part of something momentous.”

King’s spirit may have been contagious, but the Civil Rights Movement could not have been sustained on spirit alone. It was a collaborative, thoughtful effort that depended on organizational skills to pull off. Consequently, on this MLK Day, please give a thought not only to King and the other luminaries of the movement, but also to the secretaries, the bookkeepers and the office managers who kept things running.

As with my 2022 MLK Day post, I am grateful to the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford for making many of King’s papers available online.