Martin Luther King, Jr.

I never met Martin Luther King, Jr. But I knew about him as early as 1955.

1955 was a busy year. It was my second year at the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss"). That August, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi was brutally lynched. In December, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

We heard more and more about the young, charismatic minister who led the bus boycott in Montgomery, and organized the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

I only knew one person who had personal contact with the Reverend King: Will D. Campbell, a Baptist minister who was Director of Religious Life at Ole Miss from 1954 to 1956. Will was an avuncular, pipe-smoking man of Scotch-Irish background who had first been a preacher as a teen in Amite, Mississippi. He ran afoul of the University administration in a series of events, including the kerfluffle over the Reverend Al Kershaw and an incident when the Assistant Registrar, suspected of being an agent for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, discovered Will playing ping pong in the campus Y building with the minister of the Second Baptist Church in Oxford. "We were separated by a net and using separate but equal paddles," Will explained to the Chancellor.

Will left the University and went to work for the National Council of Churches Department of Racial and Cultural Relations and other organizations in Nashville. He was very impressed with Dr. King. "The man is a saint," he told me during a visit to Ole Miss in 1958.

I knew Will well enough to know he wasn't describing King as a "goody-goody," but as someone both committed and effective. He was especially impressed with King's dedication to Gandhi's concept of nonviolence. The most impressive fact about Gandhi's nonviolence is that this wizened little man in a loincloth carrying a walking stick and no weapons other than an iron will had brought down the world's greatest empire of the day.

A few years ago my wife and I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. museum in Atlanta. In the bookstore was a well-illustrated book on the civil rights movement. On the cover, a headline declared that Martin Luther King Jr. had worked to insure freedom for African Americans. I disagree. He worked to achieve freedom for Americans.