Remembering MLK’s Visit to SMU

By Elizabeth Guevara and Ceara Johnson | Opinion Editor and Sports Editor

Walking up the steps of McFarlin Auditorium this past February, Charles Cox remembers how police lined the stairs. It was March 17, 1966, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at SMU.

Cox, who was a junior at SMU the time, and another student, Bert Moore, drove King from the airport to McFarlin where he spoke for 55 minutes on “The Future of Integration.”

Now, 57 years later, Cox stood on the same steps where members of the Dallas and SMU community would celebrate the legacy MLK and the official dedication of a Texas Historical Commission marker commemorating King’s speech on campus.

Cox brings copies of a letter he wrote to his mother after meeting King and hands them to students hoping to offer a glimpse into one of the most memorable days of his life.

“There had been rumors of a ‘prophetess’ predicting that King would be shot on the SMU campus,” he wrote in 1966. “These rumors were all over Dallas and the predication had supposedly been made by the woman who predicted Kennedy’s death.”

The student senate originally invited King to come in 1964. However, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963, records say that FBI and Dallas Police convinced former SMU president William Tate to withdraw the invitation due to safety concerns. Although there was caution, Cox said the campus was in “a jubilant, happy state of mind.”

Cox’s nostalgia turns somber as he recalls hearing of King’s assassination just two years after meeting him. Cox says that while King speaking at SMU showed improvements but the fight for racial justice continues.

Contemplating society then and now, he recognizes that while there have been advancements, there will also be a fight for progress.

In 1966, after SMU Student Senate invited MLK to speak, Cox and Moore spent the day with King as he went to meetings with Dallas Pastors’ Association” and a “Social Concerns Committee of Perkins’ Seminary,” according to Cox before giving his speech at SMU in the afternoon.

“He was very down to earth and relaxed, and he had a sense of humor,” Cox said. “He had a personality that was very engaging and low-key.”

When the time arrived for King to give his speech to SMU, he spoke without notes. “He had the ability to project on the stage with this tremendous conviction and integrity,” Cox said.

King’s speech was recorded by an audience member and is available online at smu.edu. Cox explained that watching MLK speak was like watching a great athlete compete.

“It engages you intellectually and it engages you spiritually and it engages every part of you, it draws you into the sense that this is one of the greatest men of the 20th century,” Cox said. “That was his gift and he used it to ignite a movement that is still touching us today.”

Voices from the MLK Marker Celebration

“In September 1952, the Perkins School of Theology welcomed its first Black students. In 1965, to revise the story, [an] SMU football player was the first Black athlete to receive an athletic scholarship in the Southwest conference. [In] 1979, the first Black student body president, David Huntley, was elected through a writein campaign,”

- R. Gerald Turner, President of SMU

“Coming to something like this is kind of a good reminder of why we’re doing it each time and why we want to keep going and fighting for racial equality.

- Stephon Sanders, SMU alumn

“I know some of you say ‘I didn’t create it but we inherited it. As Dr. King says, ‘We can either figure [that] out or perish as fools.’”

- Reverend Richie Butler