As a civil rights activist in the south, the Rev. Edwin King said there were many times he thought he was going to die fighting for the rights of Americans.
King presented “A Rumor of Freedom, A Rumor of War: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam” on Wednesday night to about 200 people in the Auditorium. The address was sponsored by the Center for Integrative Studies.
He spoke of the hardships he faced and the rough times he endured during a period of several years.
“There were times when I knew I would be beat and tortured, but that didn’t stop me,” King said. “I could have allowed the mistreatment to go on, but I didn’t.”
As a leader in the civil rights movement, he interviewed student protesters who were detained in prisons in Mississippi. The Mississippi state fairgrounds were turned into a concentration camps where protestors were taken when they were arrested.
“They were making a joke out of the Holocaust,” King said. “They had things set up to resemble concentration camps.”
And he said the ridicule of blacks being detained and killed did not stop there.
“Like a sporting event, they had a daily tally in the paper of how many people had been killed,” King said. “They made sure everyone knew what they were doing.”
As he interviewed people about their experiences in the prisons, little did he know he would soon join them there.
“I was arrested and tortured in that same prison I had become so familiar with,” he said. “I was a leader of the movement and I was put in prison.
“We felt the federal government was abandoning us.”
As a prisoner, King was forced to stand in 103 degree heat, leaning against a wall.
King said if he moved, he would be clubbed; beaten until he couldn’t stand anymore. He said he was threatened when he tried to wipe the blood off a stranger who was standing next to him.
King said he was later released, but his experiences are something he will never forget.
“The government had failed to protect American lives,” he said. “We thought we were next, we thought we were going to die that summer.”
In the 1960s, King served as a chaplain and dean of students at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss. and is featured in the book “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” which is required reading for most IAH 201 courses.
Computer science freshman Shanti Akkineni said although she got extra credit for her IAH class for attending the lecture, it was something she wanted to attend anyway.
“Some of these things that were talked about are things I haven’t thought about,” she said. “People are not concerned enough about what happened, I’m disappointed that I don’t know enough.”
Packaging freshman Matt Wahr’s IAH class is canceled tomorrow because students were expected to be in attendance at the lecture.
“I came for the extra credit but everything he said was really interesting,” he said. “He had a personal story for everything he went through that really illustrated what people had to deal with in those times.”
