A booming sound and flashing black and white graphics flicker across the screen in the McFarlin Auditorium, showing pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights protests throughout history on Jan. 22. The SMU community gathered for Dream Week’s “A Long, Long Way” panel to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to campus 60 years ago.
During King’s visit on March 17, 1966, the Rev. Charles Cox introduced King to the stage as a student. Cox returned to campus to reflect on what his speech still means today.
“King’s legacy is still very much alive and well and needed,” Cox said. “I just want to come here and be inspired by the memory of an event 60 years ago, but also to be inspired to keep up the good fight for justice in our world.”
He smiles as he recounts his memory of seeing Dr. King coming off the plane at Love Field Airport.
“We saw him at the airport in Love Field, and then he went into a separate car than us and went and did a sermon at the Melrose Hotel where the Dallas Pastors Association was meeting,” Cox said. “Me and Burt Ward [student who also invited Dr. King to SMU] were sitting in the hallway listening to him.”
Cox retired from being a minister in 2009 and now lives half a mile away from campus. He studied at SMU from 1963-67 and completed seminary school at The Perkins School of Theology in 1975.
Cox is one of the five guest speakers featured on the event panel, along with Pastor and SMU alum Richie Butler, Dr. Maria Dixon Hall, the Rev. Lisa Garvin and Dr. Theodore Walker. Each of them shared the significance of King’s 1966 visit to SMU and the relevance of his speech today.
“[King] said we can’t move any farther as a region as the South, a place that I love, until we are willing to give up the way that we behave here,” Dixon Hall said. “Until we are willing to give up the power and the oppression that was placed on our necks as Black brothers and sisters.”
“A long, long way” holds a dear meaning to members of the SMU community, especially Brandon Kitchin, assistant director of SMU’s Social Change and Intercultural Engagement Office, who brought the event to life.
“When I first got to SMU five years ago, I was made aware of Dr. King’s visit to SMU,” Kitchin said. “To me, that’s monumental because not every school during that time would have allowed that to occur,”
Kitchin aimed to shed more light on the historic event during this year’s Dream Week, a series of campus-wide events honoring Dr. King, now in its 16th year.
“We had to do something to commemorate that, we started planning this in November, and thankfully Rev. Cox was happy to come back and speak on bringing Rev. Dr. King to campus,” Kitchin said. “It was such a big deal, I mean, in 1959, TCU rejected having Rev. Dr. King speak, so I had to do something.”
Lily Walker, a Dallas area resident who attended the event, said she now has a better understanding of what King’s mission was about.
“I listened to the speech before I came here, made notes and a lot of the same instances the speakers were mentioning, you could tell touched them in many ways,” Walker said. “This was so empowering and I learned so much.”
