Panelists recall King's visit to UVa The speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the University of Virginia on March 25, 1963, was not a pivotal moment in the overall civil rights struggle.
However, nearly 50 years later, King’s visit still has people talking about what it means to Charlottesville and UVa. Scores of residents, UVa administration, staff and students attended the “When King Came to UVa” luncheon Tuesday, part of the university’s month-long celebration of King’s legacy. Black, white, Hispanic, young and old sat side-by-side in the Harrison Institute auditorium, listening intently to panelists Wesley Harris and Paul Gaston — who organized King’s trip — relive the hours they spent with King “What is it he left us?” asked Harris, noting the speech failed to sell out Old Cabell Hall. “It never was about butts in seats. That was never King’s idea. It was a lot more profound than that.” The former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Harris was a third-year engineering major at the time of King’s visit and only the second black student to live on the Lawn. When Harris enrolled in the fall of 1960, there were eight black students. His first lab partner, a white student, immediately moved out of their shared work space. Other students spit on him and threw lit cigarettes at him. “This was a strange and different environment from what it is now,” Harris said. Gaston — a professor emeritus in UVa’s Corcoran Department of History — was a UVa faculty member at the time. Gaston helped lead and participate in sit-ins, shortly after King’s visit, which eventually helped to desegregate local restaurants, theaters and hotels. “The university was a white person’s bastion,” Gaston recalled. “The administration was not really friendly to the small numbers of students who wanted change.” In fact, no UVa administrators attended the speech, Gaston said. King’s speech — of which there is no known copy — was received politely by the mostly white audience. >From a historical perspective, it lacked the gravity of the letters that came out of his arrest in Birmingham one month later or the poignancy of his “I have a dream” speech delivered in August of that same year, Gaston said . However, the speech, and his visit, should be seen as one seed in a slow wave of change that washed over UVa and Charlottesville in the 1960s. “There was nothing immediate that came from the visit, but it was part of the transformation of the attitudes towards King, from negative or concern, to positive,” Gaston said. This culminated, he said, when then-UVa PresidentEdgar F. Shannon Jr. invoked King’s own words during a commemoration shortly after King’s assassination in 1968. More than his words, King’s visit inspired those he met in his brief time at UVa. Strolling the Grounds after the speech with King, Harris heard a car back-fire. Harris immediately mistook the sound for gunfire. “I often think about that moment,” Harris said. “He very quietly said to me: ‘It’s all right, brother Harris.’ That was courage. He didn’t duck, he didn’t flinch.” -- http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2011/jan/25/panelists-recall-kings-visit-uva-ar-798838/ Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
