Under iron gray skies, amateur genealogist Wendy Gelberg trudged through fresh snow and a corridor of tombstones dotting the landscape of the St. Joseph Cemetery in West Roxbury.
In the cemetery’s St. James of the Apostle section, she paused to check her map, which was scribbled with notes. Gelberg, who specializes in identifying unmarked graves, was there to identify the resting place of Mary Powell, who as a young woman introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to his future bride, Coretta Scott, in Boston.
“So she's in this row right here,” Gelberg said. “That's where she is. She's between — I think that says — 'Withen’ and ‘Vanderwood.’ And that is her location right in front of us.”
In Boston, you can hardly throw a stone and not hit a monument or grave marker identifying where a person of note is buried. But standing at the grave of the woman who brought together this iconic civil rights couple, there’s nothing whatsoever to indicate her significance in the world — or even her presence in it.
“I just think it's sad. Somebody lived a life that deserves to be recognized. And even for people who don't know the person who's passed. It's very heartwarming, actually, to see the tributes,” Gelberg said, pointing to a sea of polished gravestones and inscribed words of remembrance for loved ones spread across the breadth of the cemetery. But there was nothing but snow-covered ground and a plot number in Gelberg's notebook to mark where Powell was buried. There was no name.
"There's no name because there's no headstone," said Gelberg.
Mary Powell: singer, teacher and community leader
The Embrace, the new sculpture on Boston Common, was inspired by the story of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott coming together in this city. But in all of the celebration surrounding the sculpture's unveiling in January, little was said about the woman who introduced them to each other.
Powell, a former Boston school teacher and and local opera singer, passed away from leukemia on Sept. 11, 1991, at the age of 76.
An obituary published in the Boston Globe confirms that Mary Louise Powell founded "World Day" in Roxbury to assist children and the homeless. Powell, who graduated from Spellman College and the New England Conservatory of Music, had taught biology in Boston Public Schools for nearly 20 years, including several at English High.
As a young woman, she'd been friends with both King and Scott. King was a student at Boston University. Scott and Powell were sopranos studying at conservatory. Powell also knew MLK from her association with 12th Street Baptist Church and the Urban League.
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The search for Mary Louise
There are tens of thousands of unmarked and unengraved gravesites of Black and Indigenous people spread across the United States, according to the African American Intellectual History Society. Identifying those graves has garnered more attention and scholarship in recent years.
Gelberg came to know about Powell through a genealogy website that researches death records calledfindagrave.com, an internet site used by people all over the world to find burial sites. The platform relies on a community of volunteers to help pinpoint often difficult to find graves. In December, a stranger reached out for help to find the resting place of a former school teacher and opera singer in Boston who had changed her name to Mary Louise Gordon.
“I happened to see a request one day that happened to have a deadline associated with it. And it was, I think, two days before Christmas, and he had a 24-hour deadline,” said Gelberg.
The request came from Clennon King, a Georgia-born documentarian, historian and former Boston reporter, who for decades has researched Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott’s relationship. Clennon King lives in Georgia, returning there from Boston several years ago.
Weeks before The Embrace sculpture was unveiled on the Common, 14 miles away, Gelberg picked up the telephone to inform King that MLK and Scott’s college friend has rested in near total obscurity since her burial. Clennon King said he found it sadly ironic.
“Here is all of this hullabaloo around this courtship,” he said, “and the person who was really responsible for connecting them lies in an unmarked grave over in West Roxbury.”
Clennon King, no relationship to MLK, had a second purpose in seeking to find out what became of Mary Powell.
"What I was trying to do is to get a hold of her son," King said. "Her son, believe it or not, lives in Boston. She had one child, and he lives in Jamaica Plain."
Mary Powell's only child
Michael Powell, a tall, bearded man, looks younger than his 76 years suggest. Now retired, he's a former social worker who started a construction business later in life. He also describes himself as a proud father of five children. Over coffee in Jamaica Plain, he spoke adoringly of his late mother.
"I say for a little Black girl born in 1915 from Atlanta, she had a great head on her shoulders," Powell said, smiling.
He recalled how at his mother's funeral, the Rev. Michael Haynes, then senior pastor at the 12th Baptist Church and longtime friend of Martin Luther King Jr., delivered the eulogy before a small gathering of loved ones.
Michael Powell remembers the many recitals he attended with his mother, who aspired to be an opera singer like her idol, Marian Anderson. But overcoming the racial barriers in classical music was extremely difficult. She was she not able to perform as widely as she dreamed. Michael said sometimes when the wind is calm, he can almost hear his mother's melodious soprano in the air.
"She sang in the Gardner Museum, the 12th Baptist Church, the First Church in Roxbury. She was a singer, and I'm like 7 or 8 years old just tagging along," he said.
Almost apologetically, Powell explains that the reason for his mother's unmarked grave is far more complicated than might be assumed, and that it has to do with his own mortality.
“I purchased two graves there. I was going to make one stone for two graves when I passed away. So I just never deemed it to be something that I needed to do sooner than later,” he said.
For years, the memory of his mother was the only inscription he needed. But in recent months, Powell says he’s come to realize that his mother’s story deserves to be shared with others.
The introduction
On many occasions, Powell heard his mother detail her role in introducing the Kings.
“Coretta and my mother were on their way someplace,” her said. “And Martin came by, and my mother introduces Coretta to him. You know, they chat for a little while and then they part. And then later that afternoon, my mother says he called her on the telephone, and he wanted to know who that lady — who Coretta — was. And that's how they met.”
In 1953, Mary Powell drove with other friends through the Jim Crow South to Atlanta to celebrate the new couple, and then to Scott's hometown of Heiberger, Alabama, for the wedding.
That fateful meeting arranged by Powell led to the love story that’s now honored on the Boston Common.
Boston NAACP President Tanisha Sullivan suggests that the local community go even further by honoring Powell with a gravestone and prominent inscription.
“As a community, we could work with the family to help get a marker in recognition of her serving as the spark that connected two of the world's most influential and impactful leaders,” said Sullivan.
That's a gesture Michael Powell, Mary Powell's son, would welcome.
"It's a great idea. I just think that it's a wonderful thing that the community gets to recognize and honor her, as she should have been," he said.
