"People often don't remember that King was in Boston because he wasn't yet the famous Dr. King when he was here," said John Cartwright, the Martin Luther King Jr. professor emeritus of social ethics at Boston University and a contemporary of King's as a graduate student in the 1950s. "He was a struggling doctoral student who was a normal guy - even a bit of a playboy. He joked around, he dated - he was a man about town with a new Chevy."

While he was involved with Boston University campus activities, and several churches in the city, particularly the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, he was not a visible leader in the immediate area. 'A bit of a playboy'.

Though King lived for several years in the area, first at 397 Massachusetts Ave. and then in an apartment on nearby St. Botolph Street, he was not particularly active in the neighborhood.

"I imagine the area has changed a lot since [King] was here," she said. "I know the building's been redone since the '50s, and a lot of the places that characterized this neighborhood are gone. But I think King would be interested to see his old neighborhood today. It's very diverse, and there is a unique tradition of activism here in the South End that's in line with his philosophies."

Dominguez, director of the Phillips Brooks House, a student-run service organization based at Harvard University, is herself an activist, who has been working with youth in the immediate area and throughout the city for the past 10 years.

"I knew Dr. King lived on this street, and that Malcolm X and other activists all lived around here at some point, but I had no idea it was here until we decided to move in. There's nothing really big commemorating this house - the plaque is barely noticeable. It seems like this place should be a more noticeable landmark."

"We were so surprised to find this out - it was very humbling," said Dominguez, who has lived at 397 Massachusetts Ave. since September with her boyfriend. The first-floor apartment they rent is now one of several within the building, though when King lived there, it was likely a boarding house rented by the room.

From the outside, Maria Dominguez's apartment building on the Roxbury/South End line looks just like every other one on the block. The three-story red brick row house, with its rounded English-style bow front, overlooks Massachusetts Avenue, its first-floor windows just a few feet up from street level. Without the address numbers affixed above the entrances, it would be easy to confuse the many doorways lining this block. But unlike her neighbors' homes, Dominguez's building has another distinguishing feature: a small plaque on the facade that reads, "This house, built in 1884, was home to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1952-53 while he was enrolled in the Graduate School of Boston University."

In an interview with the Globe, Coretta Scott King recalled her hesitancy when a classmate first urged her to meet him.

"I had already heard about him through her, though when she said 'minister,' I wasn't interested," said Coretta.

But Cartwright was also quick to point out that just because King was not the political or civil rights activist he would later become, it doesn't mean Boston didn't have a profound effect upon him - or he upon Boston.

"While at Boston University, King was exposed to several very important things, all of which contributed to making him what he would become," said Cartwright. "For instance, it was here that he really embraced the teachings of Gandhi and the principles of nonviolence - an idea that was, at that time, unheard of as a formal ideological concept." King would later espouse and help implement these principles in his preaching and his legendary civil rights activism throughout the country.

Howard Thurman, who was dean of Marsh Chapel in the 1950s, one of the first black men to be appointed to such a position on a predominantly white campus, was also a mystic who had gone to India on a goodwill mission in the '30s and had met Gandhi. When King arrived in Boston, Thurman, who was a friend of the young scholar's parents, took King under his wing, becoming both a role model and a friend.

"The Thurmans really valued him. In fact, before he left BU, they invited him to be Howard's successor in the Church for Fellowship that Thurman had founded out in California," said George Makeachnie, the Sargent College dean emeritus and former director of the Howard Thurman Center at Boston University.

"But he'd already signed up to go to the Dexter Church in Montgomery. My wife and I always wondered just what would have happened to the civil rights movement if in fact he'd gone."

King had first learned of Gandhi's teachings years before coming to BU, when he attended a speech by Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, while King was still a young man in seminary. According to Cartwright, King left the speech spellbound, thinking that he had found a way to bring about a social change in a peaceful, loving way.

"But the truth is, ironically, it was Thurman who introduced the concepts to Johnson," Cartwright said. "Thurman introduced Gandhi to many critical thinkers, but it was King who absorbed them and made them accessible to the people as a tactical means, as a way to meet the challenges before us."

Another one of Boston's contributions to King's development was his introduction to his future wife, Coretta Scott.