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GREENSBORO

The civil rights leader electrified the audience at Bennett College's Pfeiffer Chapel that night in 1958.

Among those left spellbound by the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was John Marshall Kilimanjaro, a 28-year-old professor at N.C. A&T and secretary of the local NAACP.

Later that night, when Kilimanjaro met King at the home of one of the organizers, the professor challenged the pastor's notion of nonviolence.

"I said to him, 'You are going to wind up getting a lot of people killed because you are counting on the white man having a conscience,' " Kilimanjaro told King.

"You are absolutely right," King replied. "We must so appeal to that conscience, no matter how hard it may be ... so we will not only win our victory, but we will win him over in the process."

It was nearly 50 years ago that King's words set Kilimanjaro, then known as John Marshall Stevenson, on a path that would forever change Greensboro.

Kilimanjaro went on to found the Carolina Peacemaker, a weekly newspaper that gave a voice to the voiceless during turbulent times and forced those in power to listen. He placed a famous King quote — "Live as brothers, die as fools" — on the masthead of the paper, where it remains today. And he set about highlighting the achievements and struggles of African Americans in Greensboro and beyond.

As colorful as Don Quixote, as militant as Frederick Douglass and admittedly arrogant at times, Kilimanjaro chronicled important events in the life of the city and came to be considered one of its best-known voices.

"Kilimanjaro thought, and I agreed with him, that we needed better coverage of the African American community and some editorials that would, in effect, be more in line with what a lot of African Americans were thinking," recalled Henry Frye, a former chief justice of the State Supreme Court who at the time was a young lawyer in town.

"We had the Greensboro Daily News and the Greensboro Record, and they carried some news about African Americans other than criminal-type stuff," Frye said. "But not a whole lot."

* * *

Something's gnawing at the man everyone calls "Doc." He has a lot on his mind.

In the living room of his home in an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood, he's talking about John Marshall Kilimanjaro Jr., his autistic son, who gets too agitated around people to go to services at Temple Emanuel, where the family worships.

His neighbors are friendly, he says, but the 77-year-old wonders how it might have been had he stayed in Benbow Park, once considered affluent black Greensboro, growing older alongside the black doctors and lawyers and teachers he left behind.

An eccentric man who once displayed two white lawn jockeys in his yard in Benbow Park, Kilimanjaro moved to the other side of town partly to prove a point: that he could.

That he's now idled by health problems bothers him at times.

A classical pianist, he can still silence a room with the first few notes of Beethoven or eloquently recite chapters of the Psalms and Shakespeare. His long-term memory is good.

At other times, he searches for his words. "I might not remember what happened two days ago," he said. "I've been told I have a touch of Alzheimer's."

Yet he readily shares his thoughts on topics such as race and poverty — and can be animated and persuasive. He uses words others might have to look up in a dictionary.

"He may not be on his 'A' game," joked daughter Afrique Kilimanjaro, who returned to Greensboro four years ago to help run the newspaper. "But he's still smarter than the average bear. "

Kilimanjaro gave up driving years ago when the sleep disorder narcolepsy forced him to pull to the side of the road as many as four times between his home off West Friendly Avenue and the newspaper building on Summit Avenue.

During an episode, he falls into a trancelike state with his eyes closed, though he's not always sleeping. Increasingly, his symptoms include attacks of cataplexy that can cause him to collapse to the floor head-first.

His grueling work schedule and his medical condition forced him to retire on disability from A&T in 1981— after one day emerging from an attack to hear himself say, "And the three little pigs said to the big bad wolf."

The class looked on in disbelief.

"Did I just say something about three little pigs?" he asked. When they nodded, he walked out in tears. He'd been to doctors of all kinds but to no avail.

"I got the diagnosis, but being able to do something about it was something else," he said.

What's gnawing at him, too, is the Peacemaker's future.

* * *

The "wall of fame" in his spacious office in the Carolina Peacemaker building includes a picture of Kilimanjaro's mother, Isabelle Lawson Stevenson, in a nurse's white uniform and cap. Also hanging on the wall is a photo of John Marshall Robinson, a doctor and great uncle for whom he was named.

"He often reminded us we were standing on big shoulders," said Afrique Kilimanjaro, who now works out of her dad's office.

These days, Kilimanjaro comes here only occasionally. But the awards on the wall speak of his legacy and the paper's 41 years of service, which include coverage of the fight to desegregate schools and the fight for a district system that would make it easier for local black people to be elected to political office.

"The people who knew him back in the day look up to him because they remember what he did in the community," said C. Vickie Kilimanjaro, a former media specialist at Dudley High School who spent late nights at the newspaper with her husband.

"Very few of those people are around now."

He founded the Peacemaker in 1967, naming it for the Bible verse: "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall see God." He also named it after a pistol out of the Old West known as "the Peacemaker."

Kilimanjaro knew his would be a paper that took stands on politics — unlike some of the forerunners in Greensboro's black community that mainly printed stories about birthday parties and obituaries.

Only, he'd never worked at a newspaper.

"He didn't know how to do it," Vickie Kilimanjaro said. "We went over to Durham one day and we sat down and talked to the publisher of the black newspaper there. He told him what he wanted to do. Mr. Austin (the publisher) said, 'Are you out of your mind, boy?' "

What he did have was Charlie Womack of Danville, Va., whose father had other newspaper investments. Womack put up $6,000 as a silent partner and taught Kilimanjaro about layout and design. The honeymoon lasted about two months.

"Charlie, being a good businessman, said I can't keep throwing good money after the bad," Kilimanjaro said. "One of the things I realized is if I was depending on it to feed my wife and children, it wouldn't."

But the newspaper did get noticed.

A story in the July 5, 1967, edition, which cost 10 cents, read: "Negro dentists are not coming to practice in North Carolina because of the racial composition of its state examination board."

An early editorial on political patronage lamented the eight new judges approved by then-Gov. Dan Moore. "Those Negroes who feel that a Negro should have been among the chosen few for election to the bench are, of course, justified in their thinking," Kilimanjaro wrote, "but their thinking represents an unrealistic outlook on the political world."

Bob Davis, a young A&T sociology professor in the 1970s, said Kilimanjaro wasn't easily pegged. "(He) made a lot of people mad because he was his own man and did not follow the party line."

For example, when Jimmie I. Barber was the lone black member of the City Council for a long time in the 1970s, Kilimanjaro took him to task, writing that he would not take positions in the best interest of the black community, Davis said.

"His legacy will be he told it like it was, at least like he thought it was," Davis said.

Kilimanjaro admits he wasn't always the easiest person to work for. He could be demanding and unpredictable.

"I've had them walk out and leave me in a darkened office," he said of staff turnover — sometimes on deadline.

Indeed, Kilimanjaro's was an ego so strong that the paper over the years became a reflection of his anger and pride.

A column Kilimanjaro wrote in slave dialect, called "Old Nosey," probably stirred people up more than anything, said Ernie Pitt, publisher of the Winston-Salem Chronicle, a similar newspaper.

"I think that he exposed a lot of stuff through Old Nosey," said Pitt, a journalism school graduate who worked for Kilimanjaro before starting the Chronicle.

"I suspect Doc handled it that way because when you do an investigative story it takes time and resources, and most weeklies I know of don't have time to put a reporter on one thing that may take six months to ferret it out."

The paper defied economics for a long time, but Kilimanjaro never missed a deadline. At times, the Kilimanjaros reached into their own bank account to make payroll.

" 'We're not going to let you close up, we just don't want to see you get fat,' " one car dealer told him when deciding whether to buy an ad. "He meant that he didn't want me to join him in America's Dream, that I would become wealthy, secure, able to compete. That really got to me."

But the lure of easy money didn't move him either.

Davis recalls going with the other co-chairman of a bond referendum committee to seek support from Kilimanjaro and telling him they planned to buy an ad.

"He sat there with his hands on his head and said, 'Let me say something to you. The Carolina Peacemaker is not for sale. ... If I'm going to support this I want you to know it's not because of you putting these dollars in front of it. If I do it's because it's the best thing for the community.' "

His reputation, however, would take a major hit when a former A&T intern sued him in 1994 and won $55,000 after alleging he touched her and made sexually suggestive gestures.

Kilimanjaro, who entered the courtroom in a wheelchair and walked out on his own accord, wouldn't settle to avoid a public trial.

He continues to maintain his innocence.

"He was hardheaded, he was stubborn," said his wife, who believed her husband but thought settling the case would be easier. "He wouldn't listen to me and he wouldn't listen to his attorney."

* * *

It's been several years since Kilimanjaro largely turned the business over to his wife of 51 years and Afrique, who grew up as the newsroom gofer but has other interests. She is a scientist by training and has written environmental policy for the federal government.

"I kept it going, hoping the next generation will take it on," Kilimanjaro said.

Although he applauds his daughter's efforts, he also wonders if the time has come to sell. He doesn't want his wife to worry about keeping the newspaper afloat when they should be enjoying retirement and grandchildren.

"She should be in her rose garden," he said. "She's out there in the dark some nights pruning her roses. How can a man stand by and watch his wife come home in tears and driven to cursing?"

"He said just last week, 'This paper is 41 years old and I want you to get some rest,' " Vickie Kilimanjaro said.

Even with its highs and lows, the Peacemaker has done what Kilimanjaro set out to do, and that's to get people talking — and thinking. That's what King mentioned that night in 1958.

"He may not even himself know the importance of the Carolina Peacemaker," said Hal Sieber, a friend and former editor of the paper. "He may not know because of his eccentricity — and some people write other people off because of eccentricity. But eccentric or not, he made a tremendous contribution to Greensboro."

Contact Nancy H. McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com