Housing

Kilgore house

Inside Kilgore House
Thomas Kilgore Jr. House is a three-story residential building that houses 102 students in double-occupancy rooms. Kilgore is also the home of the Department of Housing and Residential Education. The residential space is a traditional corridor style, double occupancy rooms. There is a full-size community kitchen and lounge area in this building, and there are community bathrooms and showers on each floor. Kilgore House is connected to the Kilgore Student Center, which houses the Division of Student Services, the POD convenience store, and to-go fast food.

Reverend Thomas Kilgore Jr. ’35 was an influential theologian and civil rights activist on both coasts, serving as pastor of New York City’s Friendship Baptist Church and Los Angeles’s Second Baptist Church, the oldest Black Baptist Church in the city. He was an organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which fellow Morehouse alumnus Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Kilgore managed the New York City office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by Dr. King, and helped organize what would become the Los Angeles chapter of the organization. 

Kilgore served as the first Black president of the American Baptist Convention and later served as president of the two million-member Progressive National Baptist Convention. He also served as founding president of the Heart of Harlem Neighborhood Church Association, which fought segregation in New York City.

Outside Kilgore House