|
|
Editor's note: At a gathering sponsored by the Bloomington Professional Staff Council Jan. 15, a panel of community members recalled their personal memories of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Panelists included three with IU affiliations. Here are their memories:
The NAACP's Roy Wilkins had asked her to sing a spiritual at the August 1963 civil rights rally in Washington, D.C. But Camilla Williams ended up singing The Star Spangled Banner as well.
Williams recalled that another singer on the program was caught in traffic, and Wilkins needed someone to sing the national anthem. (Contralto Marian Anderson was stuck in traffic.)
"I ran up all the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and was out of breath when I got to the microphone," she said. But she sang to the 200,000 gathered there and the next year, after King won the Nobel Peace Prize, she sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic for a gathering of dignitaries and friends of the civil rights leader. "I was honored to know Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta," she told the audience.
Williams was the first black singer on contract to appear with the New York City Opera. She premiered in 1946 as Cio Cio San in Madame Butterfly, and she was the IU School of Music's first black professor of voice.
Edge remembered growing up in Birmingham, Ala., during the early stages of the civil rights movement and attending the first high school integrated there.
"In the 1960s in Birmingham, there were separate schools, separate water fountains, blacks couldn't use the elevators or downtown parking lots," he explained.
Edge said that when his school was integrated, two-thirds of the student body walked outside and chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate!"
"Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that we could sit down together as brothers and sisters," said Edge.
Gordon was born in the South and saw daily acts of terrorism."You can't beat racism and hatred out of people," he said.
Gordon described an "underground" part of the civil rights movement in Petersburg, Va. In the basement of a church, blacks were taught to recite from memory the third article of the Virginia constitution, a condition that had been imposed to hinder voter registration.
"Times have changed, but not enough," he told the audience.
Return to Table of Contents