by Michael Andersen
News Editor
The Forum South Lounge was crowded.
“A lot of us were very angry,” remembered one witness. “Some people were distraught and crying. Some people were distraught and crying and angry.”
“We were in serious grief,” said another. “We had people throwing furniture.”
The 50-odd students in the room were all African-American. Some others had asked to enter, but were turned away at the door.
“We felt there was a time to be alone,” explained one of the black students. “The people who were there understood.”
Thirty-five years later, the lounge was crowded again, this time with more white faces than black, and three African-American alumni sat at a table with a history professor and the editor of the Grinnell Herald-Register, wearing ties and describing the day that Martin Luther King was shot.
The alumni, Hubert Forbes ‘69, Henry Wingate ‘69 and Frank Thomas ‘71, had been invited to return to the South Lounge as part of last week’s celebration of King’s life. At the panel, they spoke of the fear they’d felt when they heard of his death.
“We knew that other people around the country would respond to King’s assassination with violence,” said Thomas, who is now Grinnell College’s vice president for diversity and the chair of the Grinnell Area Chamber of Commerce. And in those first few hours, some students thought violence might be the only natural response.
“I felt stabbed through the heart, and I felt that the country was responsible for it,” said Forbes, then the spokesperson for Concerned Black Students (CBS) and now a private lawyer and the former assistant attorney general of Colorado. “I am surprised at how moderate I managed to be.”
No one took charge, everyone agrees: no one knew what to do. The crowd wasn’t limited to CBS—according to Thomas, just about every black student in the school showed up in the Forum eventually, including those that had found the group distastefully moderate when it was organized the previous semester.
One student had an audio recording of one of King’s speeches. The group listened to it. Then they tracked down more recordings, by Malcolm X, the black leader who had begun his career calling for retribution against whites but had become increasingly less violent in the months leading up to his 1965 assassination.
By the time they had worked their way through X’s life, the room was calm.
Remembering a visit
By a trick of the calendar, Grinnell classes have rarely been taught on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Observed) since the holiday was established in 1986. Though the academic schedule observes no national holidays except Thanksgiving, many Grinnellians were troubled when, in 2002, the holiday fell on the first day of the semester but passed without any major commemorative events.
Later that spring, Concerned Black Students sponsored a successful student initiative calling on the college “to organize special events to commemorate Martin Luther King Day.” Some faculty chimed in as well, some saying that classes should be cancelled entirely in future years, others recommending that professors integrate King’s life with the curriculum. That summer, knowing that the day would also fall during the semester in 2003 and 2004, Dean of the College Jim Swartz asked Wayne Moyer, Political Science, to organize a committee to set a schedule of events for the 2003 holiday.
Moyer asked CBS students and several professors and administrators to join the Rosenfield committee, which he heads, in brainstorming a celebration in which “the whole community would feel a sense of ownership.”
Among other things, they decided to listen to one of King’s speeches.
King visited Grinnell in October 1967, six months before his death, as a key speaker in a symposium on “The Liberal Arts College in a World of Change.” About 5000 people packed Darby Gym to hear the 38-year-old Baptist preacher and Nobel laureate exhort them to take action against injustice, inequality, racism, and violence at home and abroad. For last week’s celebration, Thomas—who, like all the other students on campus when King was shot, had been present for the visit—and Steve Andrews, English, edited an audiotape of the speech for presentation in Herrick Chapel on the evening of January 20.
Editing that speech, said Andrews, was inevitably a political process. “We came up with portions that we felt would speak not only to what King was about in the context of the 60s,” he said. “We looked at certain things that might still resonate today.”
The result, made up of live readings from current and former students and excerpts in King’s own voice, was juxtaposed with a succession of photographs from the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and King’s visit to Darby.
“To bring another generation up under war and bloodshed will be tragic,” said King’s recorded voice. “So I say that if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war we can destroy ourselves. But in a day when Sputniks and Explorers and Geminis are dashing though outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can really win a war.”
Making an argument
Other events of the week walked a line between commemoration and political activism. At Monday’s panel with Thomas and Forbes, Al Jones ’50, History, implicitly criticized recent action by the Bush administration against affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Later that night, Grinnellians met at a local church to remember the community’s reaction to King’s death. Before leading a candlelight march to Herrick Chapel, where King’s speech was to be presented, Thomas asked marchers to remain on the sidewalk in order to avoid being ticketed for demonstrating without a permit.
Wednesday night, Charles Ogletree, an associate dean of Harvard Law School and a prominent African-American thinker and activist, delivered an address generally commemorating King’s vision—and then, in response to questions from the audience, spent an equal amount of time detailing current debates over affirmative action and reparations for oppressed groups. Ogletree, an expert on the issues, made no secret of his support for such policies.
“I think the group felt that we needed somebody to put some kind of argument, if you would, with the events,” said Moyer of Ogletree’s visit.
One last event of the week was less-publicized on Grinnell’s campus. Latrisha Chattin ‘03, the current spokesperson of CBS and a member of Moyer’s committee, wrote a play for 12 third- and fourth-graders at Davis Elementary. In a series of monologues, the young students explained for their classmates why school had been out that Monday.
Chattin said the actors, all of whom were white, loved it. There was one small problem, though.
“Almost all of them wanted to be King,” she said. “There was one part where there was a King quote, and everybody wanted to say that quote.”
News | Arts | Reviews | Features | Opinion | Sports | Staff | Archives | Email the Editor | Email the Webmaster