Mikie Sherrill announces she’ll steer resources to honor MLK in Camden in visit ahead of inauguration

A day before taking the oath as New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill said in a visit to Camden on Monday that she will steer resources to the city to commemorate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sherrill visited Camden on Monday morning to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day by joining a community effort to shovel snow. In a short speech, she emphasized King’s historical connection to Camden and an incident he’s said to have cited as sparking his interest in becoming a civil rights leader.

“I’m going to work with the city of Camden to make sure we can better bring this history to light, that we bring resources to commemorate the real birth of this movement here in Camden, New Jersey,” she said.

Sherrill’s team told local officials last week that she would be announcing plans to commission a statue of King for Camden, but they backtracked minutes before her announcement to instead make a broader promise.

Her transition team later told The Inquirer that Sherrill “is excited about the chance to elevate the history of Martin Luther King Jr. in Camden, and will work with the community on different possibilities to do this, including with a statue.”

Sherrill’s decision to come to Camden on MLK Day — the eve of her swearing-in and also her 54th birthday — was significant to local officials. It showed that the diverse South Jersey city is at the top of her mind after it resoundingly voted for her in November and improved turnout compared to the last gubernatorial election.

Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen said in an interview on Saturday — anticipating a statue announcement — that he would want King to be honored in a spot in Farnham Park that has sat empty since a statue of Christopher Columbus was removed in June 2020 amid a nationwide reckoning on racism after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.

Camden released a statement at the time saying the statue’s removal was “long overdue.”

Carstarphen said the city has been wanting to replace that statue with one that’s more fitting for the community at some point. He said “it only makes just great sense” for King’s honor to be put there.

State Sen. Nilsa Cruz-Perez, a Democrat who represents Camden, said in an interview on Friday that residents were surprised that Sherrill chose to come back to Camden so soon after being elected.

“It’s a good message for the South Jersey region that she is going to be available for South Jersey, that she’s someone who’s going to pay attention,” Cruz-Perez said.

City Council member Nohemi Soria-Pérez, who works as the chief of staff for Cruz-Pérez and two local assembly members, said Sherrill’s attention to Camden, and the possibility of a King statue, is “just such a positive step forward into what we see in the future.”

Sherrill said in her speech that she loves learning “so many neat things about our state that otherwise you just wouldn’t realize, even places you pass by every single day.”

“And I have to tell you, one of the coolest was hearing about Martin Luther King’s history in Camden, the fact that many scholars say he had his very first act of civil disobedience here in Camden,” she added.

She was referencing an incident in 1950 in which King and his friends reported that they were refused service at Mary’s Cafe, a tavern in Maple Shade Township in nearby Burlington County — not Camden — while attending Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County.

King often recounted the incident as an example that sparked his interest in the civil rights movement, according to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and reported in a 1976 Inquirer obituary of the tavern owner.

Widespread accounts of the incident indicate that the tavern owner shot his gun in the air, but Sherrill said in her speech that King had a gun “pointed at him.”

“I didn’t realize that he lived in Camden during his years as a student at Crozer Theological Seminary from 1948 to 1951,” she also said.

That may be because historians have argued there is no evidence King actually lived in the house, but rather stayed there during visits.

The state denied an application to designate the house as a historical landmark in early 2020 after it commissioned an unprecedented $20,000 study by Stockton University, which made the case that the home wasn’t King’s residence.

The belief that King lived in the home stems in part from the building’s then-owner and his daughter saying the civil rights leader lived there “on and off for two years.”

Regardless of the disputed details, King is widely understood to have a connection to Camden.

David Garrow, a historian and the author of the King biography Bearing the Cross, has previously said he believes King spent time in Camden and likely occasionally stayed at the Walnut Street house where he visited his friend.

The state-commissioned study noted that King “almost certainly” stayed there the night of the Mary’s Place incident described by Sherrill.

John Lewis, a civil rights leader and member of Congress who died in 2020, visited the building in 2016 and called it a “piece of historic real estate that must be saved for generations yet unborn.”

Local advocates have sought to rehabilitate the Walnut Street home — which sustained a fire in 2023. A 2017 grant of $229,000 was earmarked to renovate the building — which sat vacant and in disrepair even before the fire — but the money was diverted to the city’s fire department in 2018 without explanation.

Voter turnout in Camden increased 63% from the last gubernatorial election in 2021 to 2025, and the city voted for Sherrill with 92% of the vote.

Sherrill and running mate Dale Caldwell visited the city repeatedly in the weeks leading up to Election Day, and Caldwell was in Camden on Saturday. The city’s population is nearly 38% Black and more than 54% Latino, and Sherrill’s campaign had outreach teams specifically catered toward both groups.

Carstarphen said a statue of King would be “a daily reminder” to Camden’s residents that “our city matters.”

“It sends a powerful message to us that we’re not an afterthought,” he said ahead of Sherrill’s visit.