As Martin Luther King Jr. gracefully strolled over to the Auditorium on a cold February day, a group of MSU students congregated behind trying to get a glimpse of the star saying, "Hello" and requesting autographs.
"It was like the Piped Piper," said urban planning Professor Robert Green, who said King stopped and signed some autographs before he entered the Auditorium as the jam-packed audience erupted into applause.
It was about 38 years ago when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students and faculty members who crowded into the Auditorium. Several standing ovations proceeded throughout the 35 to 40 minute speech.
Some were turned away because they could not squeeze in, but Green and College of Communication Arts and Sciences Dean James Spaniolo, who were in the audience, have become friends since they heard King speak that day.
But at the time of King's first visit to MSU on Feb. 11, 1965, the two were strangers to one another.
Green was an associate education professor in his 30s when he invited King to speak on campus.
"I had been watching the movement," said Green, who had met King beforehand in San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif. By inviting King to campus, he said he wanted to try and sensitize students to the lack of civil rights in the South.
About seven months after King's MSU appearance, Green took a leave of absence from the university to work with King. He became the education director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led an anti-poverty program in several southern states.
Green said King's staff members were always concerned about protecting him. King was seen as a remarkably honest and good man, he said.
"He once said to me John F. Kennedy had the Army, Marine and Navy to protect him, but you can't hide - that was his philosophy," Green said.
And King remained strong even after a gun was put to his head by a gas station employee in Mississippi, Green said. Without flinching, Green sat next to King as the employee threatened to pull the trigger. Green recalls King saying, "God bless you, brother," and the employee put down the gun.
Through all the hardships King endured, Green says he never saw King cry. "But that's not to say he didn't," Green said. Green added he never saw his wife, Coretta Scott King, cry either except at her husband's funeral, holding her daughter Yolanda on her lap. Green still keeps in touch with Coretta.
Green says King would continue to oppose what he called the three evils in today's society - poverty, war and all forms of discrimination.
Although Green says the country is on the right track to achieving an unbiased society, there still needs to be advancements.
"The greatest challenge is that we develop and maintain an open society where people aren't judged on how they look or think, but how they behave and treat others," Green said.
As a student, Spaniolo was a freshman State News reporter who recorded his reaction to King's speech in a journal he kept. Spaniolo also wrote a feature story for The State News about Green's experiences with King.
Spaniolo said King was seen by most college students in the North as a charismatic hero, and students were hopeful in creating a society with no racial discrimination or prejudice. But when King visited MSU for a second time on March 9, 1966, the Auditorium was half-empty.
King's second visit came after a violent confrontation in Selma, Ala., and for some students, the civil rights movement wasn't at the forefront of their agenda - a radical difference from the previous year when the Auditorium was overflowing with people to hear King speak, Spaniolo said.
Since then, he said "enormous progress" has been made for African Americans from economic, educational and career standpoints. But he added it is hard to know whether a transformation has been made until 35 to 40 years from now.
"We are still living with the effects of that 300 years of history. Despite the remarkable progress which has been made over the past 30 to 40 years, we have not eliminated racism, prejudice and discrimination," Spaniolo said. "We are not even close to living in a color-blind society and may never be."
Spaniolo said he can prove his theory in 2003 with a simple test.
"How many white men and women in America in 2003 would say, in all honesty, 'I wish I was a person of color, or a Latino because my life and economic prospects would be better?'"
Alison Barker can be reached at barkera6@msu.edu.
