It was a hot day, but not too hot, the day that he visited UCLA.
He drove up to Janss Steps in a beige station wagon and stepped out
to the makeshift stage set up for his visit.
It was April 27, 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking
to an estimated 5,000 faculty and students who had gathered to hear
the civil rights leader speak.
Seventy-five years after King was born, people still gather to
celebrate his life and work on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this
coming Monday. For those who saw King during his visit, the day
stirs vivid memories.
“My recollection was that those attending went all the way
up the hill, though most people wanted to get down closer,”
said Norris Hundley, a professor emeritus at UCLA who was present
at the event. “It was a dense crowd, a very supportive crowd.
They were very sympathetic to his main message.”
Robert Dallek, a former UCLA professor, said he didn’t
remember too much of what was said, but did remember listening to
King speak.
“He was a brilliant, thrilling, inspirational
speaker,” Dallek said. “He was a minister; there was an
evangelical quality to him.”
The focus of King’s speech that day continued with the
same themes he had been sharing with audiences across the
country.
“The main message was civil rights for all
Americans,” Hundley said. “The right to vote, to live
where they want to live, and the right to get the types of jobs
that would allow them to live in the places they want to
live.”
King, who visited UCLA only a few months after being awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize and just one month after his successful march
from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, spoke about the progress of
civil rights work.
“We have broken loose from the Egypt of slavery, broken
the bonds of legal segregation and now stand on the threshold of
the promised land,” King said, according to a Daily Bruin
article that ran on April 28, 1965.
King also warned that the road ahead was not yet going to become
more simple, despite recent developments in the fight against
segregation. He said while there were new laws in place, it would
continue to be a struggle to change the attitudes and hearts of
people toward equality as well.
While much of King’s message was similar in theme to what
the audience had already heard, it provided a different insight
into King’s movement.
“(Being there) brought you closer to that message,”
Hundley said. “You saw someone who was spearheading this
movement for equality, and it made it exciting to be there. It was
a political crusade for both a moral issue and a political
issue.”
Some students who attended were moved to action by King’s
words.
“A number of students were impressed enough that they
spent most of the next summer working in the South helping people
to register to vote,” said Roger Daniels, a professor
emeritus at the University of Cincinnati who previously taught at
UCLA.
“Many of them were arrested for protests, but none were
seriously beaten. It was for these volunteers, a couple of dozen,
that there clearly was tremendous impact made,” Daniels
said.
Some of the students even worked to take a collection for King
during the event, raising $747.98 which was presented to King
directly after the event.
“In 1965 there was no doubt about how most Americans felt
and about how students felt,” Daniels said. “Students
were very much agreed that segregation had to go.”
The sympathetic atmosphere of the UCLA campus during 1965 was
not mirrored elsewhere in the country, however. One month earlier
in Alabama, King faced quite a different audience. On March 7, a
day now known as Bloody Sunday, he attempted to lead the march from
Selma to Montgomery. The march ended in beatings by the state
troopers sent to control the marchers.
A few weeks later, however, King did manage to lead a successful
march on March 25, attended by several UCLA faculty including
Hundley, Daniels and Dallek.
“I remember vividly the people who lived in the
area,” Dallek said. “Women were crying and waving their
handkerchiefs at us.”
“It was pretty frightening,” he said. “The
national guard had been federalized; otherwise they would have
joined in the oppression of the marchers. Whites supporting blacks
were seen as traitors to the white race.”
Daniels also recalled the tense atmosphere, but he said they
seemed to be well protected.
“It was a very emotional time, but there was tremendous
protection,” Daniels said. “Troops were lining the
sidewalks and there were constantly helicopters
overhead.”
The sentiment in the South was much different than that of the
college campuses, Daniels said, and it was probably much more
representative of the turmoil going on in the rest of the
country.
The UCLA professors, who had been invited along with other
historians from around the country by King to participate in the
event, had to spend the night on a black college campus because the
local motels were hostile to their cause. Daniels said the
adjustment was worth it.
“It was certainly an exhilarating moment in that those of
us who marched felt very much united and felt that there was a
strong national consensus that segregation and that all that went
with it had to go,” Daniels said.
King’s work, Hundley said, helped bring change that
finally turned the country around.
“That was an enormous impact and change,” Hundley
said. “Lots of people were advocating civil rights and equity
for citizens, and every day you see examples of it everywhere. That
doesn’t mean the struggles are over; people are still trying
to make improvements in a variety of ways.”