Willa B. Player

Dr. Willa B. Player
(August 9, 1909-August 29, 2003)

In 1953, Dr. Player became the first female president of Bennett College for Women In Greensboro, NC and the first African American woman in the country to be named president of a four-year fully accredited liberal arts college.

During the peak of civil rights demonstrations in Greensboro, when almost 40 percent of the Bennett student body was arrested and jailed, Player visited students daily and arranged for professors to hold class and administer exams for jailed students. She also arranged for Martin Luther King to speak in Feb 1958, when no other group in Greensboro was willing to host him."

It was the local NAACP chapter that sponsored King's visit 60 years ago, but as the story goes, members almost gave up in frustration as door after door was slammed while the chapter tried to find a place to hold the rally.
Many people didn't know how to respond to the brave orator who declared that segregation was wrong and that it was time to break the bondage

On campus, King sat for an interview with reporters from the student newspaper, the Bennett Banner, who asked a range of questions from race relations in Montgomery after the bus boycott to President Dwight Eisenhower's the use of federal troops to integrate Central High School.

"Many of these persons are bitter," King responded to the question about the success of the bus boycott, " and they are just as determined to preserve segregation as Negroes are to lift the thing."


Source:http://crdl.usg.edu/people/p/player_willa_b/?Welcome

Source:http://www.journalnow.com/.../article_76627f23-56df-574a...