“We all sat through the march, and I was trembling because there were so many people there, you couldn’t imagine. You couldn’t dare to count them. I just felt for King as he sat there waiting to be introduced. I knew that the way they listened to people who were making speeches in rallies like this one, there was always somebody in the background trailing that speech with printed material. And I knew that somebody had a pencil following every word to see whether King would make a mistake or not repeat what he had placed there on paper. And I couldn’t get to him to wink my eye or say to him, ‘Mike’—as we called him during the days of seminary—‘come on, come on, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it.’

The crowd was so great, and it seemed to me that the spirit of God came upon him at this particular time, just like it does when someone is giving a speech that is very near and dear to him. And the words just flowed. The ideas came. He was saying what was on his heart and mind, and what he had been talking about all along.

When we were in seminary together, King would walk around the hall preaching. He had more experience in preaching than some of us, although I was nine years older than he was and pastoring a small church in West Virginia. But when he became very popular he called us together and said, ‘You all must stick by me, for I am going to dismantle this society.’ And we would jokingly say to him, ‘King, if you try to dismantle this society that we’re in now, somebody’s going to shoot you. Somebody’s going to bring you down, because society is so ingrained with segregation. The culture has been born into segregation, and therefore it’s not going to change.’”