Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was on his way to Bennett College on Feb. 11, 1958, and the crowd there was growing.
Bennett President Dr. Willa B. Player, whom history would recall as having a backbone of steel for inviting the then-29-year-old King to speak, had asked students to stay away from the gathering, because of threats to bring harm to Dr,King and the campus,. She was afraid there could be violence, and King was going to meet the next day with her students.
Most of the students disregarded her warning to stay away from the chapel where Dr. King was scheduled to speak and filled in the seats eager to hear Dr. King speak. They had heard about Montgomery and were full of the fire for freedom.

Before King’s speech at the March on Washington 50 years ago today, the future Nobel Peace Prize winner warmed up with an overflowing audience at the private women’s college.

King was gaining in national prominence that year, having already led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which resulted in the 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that black people must be given equal seating on buses. But there was no cable news or Internet. There was only radio and the evening broadcast news.

“We heard some of his speeches and what he was trying to do,” said retired history teacher Jacqueline Kpeglo, who was 11 at the time and got permission from her parents to go to the gathering with a friend. “We knew about Rosa Parks and what she had done.”

Actually, while the 1958 visit would be his first to Bennett, King was often in Greensboro. He, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who would be the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and others, often gathered around a huge table in civil rights attorney Kenneth Lee’s law library. Lee, then an attorney for the NAACP, represented most of the civil rights demonstrators in Greensboro and other parts of the state.

King and other civil rights icons also often slept in the lower level of Lee’s home, partly because of the inability to find public accommodations.

“We often walked in downtown Greensboro and nobody knew who he was,” said Lee, who was one of the plaintiffs who successfully sued to integrate the law school at UNC-CH.

But on that February day in 1958, the demand was so huge for the 800-seat Pfeiffer Chapel that loudspeakers were set up across the campus for the overflow crowd.

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.
“People were playing it safe; they were afraid of reprisals,’’ Edwin R. Edmonds, a former president of the Greensboro chapter of the NAACP and a Bennett College professor, told the News & Record before his death in 2007.

Many blacks and whites alike wanted to keep the status quo, Edmonds said."

Source:http://www.greensboro.com/.../article_e8c54e90-0f8d-11e3...