One-on-one memories of MLK

Martin, son of a prominent Baptist minister from Atlanta, usually played in his street shoes.

“He was always well dressed, and I’m not sure he even owned sneakers,’’ Rogers, now 82, recalled the other day by phone from California. “But we’d be out on the court and you could hear his hard leather shoes clicking along . . . click-click-click across the wooden floor.’’

Today the nation honors the memory of that young man who played hoops in the church basement gym in his leather shoes. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams - bigger than most Americans, of color or not, dared to conjure - went on to help shape the nation.

King came to BU, according to Rogers, because he firmly believed “it was the only white college in the country then that offered black students the chance to earn graduate degrees in theology.’’ At the time, if a black man or woman taught or preached religion in the South, or anywhere in America, he added, it was a good bet his or her graduate degree was earned at the school’s Comm. Ave. campus.

King arrived in Boston in the summer of 1951 and received his PhD in systematic theology in the spring of 1955, by which time he was in place as a pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala. Rogers arrived from Drew, located in Madison, N.J., at the start of the 1952-53 academic year. Born in Harlem, he returned there as a Methodist minister after earning his master’s of divinity at BU.

Rogers, now retired, was born the same year as King, whose birthday was yesterday. He has fond memories of their BU days together, when King would zip around town in his green Chevy and have school friends visit at his off-campus apartment in the South End. While studying at BU, King was a paid member of the city’s Ebenezer Baptist Church ministry, earning $4,000 a year, according to Rogers.

“And that was a lot of money in those days,’’ recalled Rogers. “Back then, $4,000, Martin was doing OK.’’

There was, Rogers recalled, a nearly magnetic quality, an aura about King.

“People followed him all over the BU campus,’’ he said. “Especially the other black kids from the South. Wherever he went, he had his retinue of at least four or five other black kids around him. He stayed in constant touch with home, so he had all the news from the South, and the black kids from down there flocked to him.’’

The basketball games were one-on-one, usually in the small gym of a local church not very far from the BU campus. It was a long time ago, some 60 years gone by, and some of the memories have faded, but not the sense of freedom and joy Rogers shared on the court with the other man who soon became an icon of American social justice.

They were two black men from out of town, in their early 20s, and the church gym was a welcoming place in a city that still had not fully figured out what gyms were open to nonwhites. Rogers lived in a dorm at BU, where, he said, black and white theology students were intentionally paired as roommates. His pal’s girlfriend, Coretta Scott from Heiberger, Ala., studied at the nearby New England Conservatory of Music, where black women were yet to be housed in dormitories.

“We’d be shooting the ball, bad-mouthing each other, saying what we were going to do to one another out there on the court,’’ recalled Rogers. “He was in good shape, but I wouldn’t say Martin was any kind of athlete, or worked out regularly or any of that. Let’s just say I usually beat him . . . but there was this one day, on one play, he really got me.’’

On that day, Coretta was on King’s mind. “He dribbled, stopped, and at the end he made this sort of crazy, twisty move,’’ Rogers said, laughing as he summoned the long-ago memory. “He just threw the ball up there and it went in! Well, he raved about that, went on and on, telling me, ‘That was for Coretta! That was for Coretta!’ He got me there, got me real good.’’

King’s voluminous papers, detailing his thoughts on racial equality, social justice, and civil disobedience, have been stored at BU for nearly a half-century. He donated his works to the school in 1964, roughly a year after his dynamic “I Have a Dream’’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and roughly four years before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, at age 39.

Most of the King collection is stored, per his wishes, and available only for research purposes, but some of his writings and artifacts, leather briefcase with his initials included, are displayed for public viewing at the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Reading Room at the Mugar Memorial Library.

One of the Rogers-King basketball contests left King with a bloody lip, courtesy of a Rogers power move to the hoop. King would go on to be known the world over for the powerful words that came from those lips, but Rogers got the better of him in that matchup.

“It’s really ancient history,’’ said Rogers. “I like to kid that we played basketball and his feet actually never touched the ground . . . because he was Martin Luther King and he was divine.’’

Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at dupont@globe.com.