Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. At
that time, April, 1968, I was on the faculty of Keuka College in Keuka Park,
NY. Earlier, I had been involved in the Selma-Montgomery March and had met Dr.
King when he came to Brown University to give atalk, so I was affected deeply
by his death. Keuka College was located in Yates County in upstate New York, a
very conservative part of the state. Later in 1968, in the presidential primary
election, the top vote-getter in Yates County was George Wallace, the governor
of Alabama and a notorious white supremacist. Nevertheless, there were a few
faculty and more students at Keuka who cared about Dr. King. So we organized a
march - more of a "walk" actually - from the campus to the Yates
County Courthouse in Penn Yan, a distance of about 3 miles. We held a vigil at
the Courthouse. As I recall, there were some hecklers, but for the most part,
it was a fairly quiet affair. It was all we could think to do to honor him. It
wasn't a lot, but it was something worth doing.
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| March for Martin Luther King, Jr., at Keuka College, April 4, 1968. The President, G. Wayne Glick, is leading. I am the tall guy a few places back. |
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