The Hill News

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his most famous speech on the steps of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, I was in Charleston, South Carolina preparing for my second year as a history teacher at segregated C. A. Brown high school. I first met the civil rights icon during the weekend of October 14-16, 1960 while serving as a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  The last time I saw Dr. King was July 31, 1967, when we had lunch in the home of Septima Poinsett Clark who ran the Freedom School on Johns Island and taught Rosa Parks at Highlander School in Tennessee. The civil rights movement was truly a church-centered movement, and having grown up in a parsonage as the eldest son of a minister, the leaders of the movement were men and women who were like family to me. 

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