"Was Dr. King a Wolfpack Fan?"

history under our feet

Photo by Perry Aycock, AP

This fall and winter, Bea and Harriet have loved cheering on NC State’s women’s basketball team (currently ranked 6th in the nation!) from section 205 in Reynolds Coliseum. They love the Waldo-striped band, Mr. and Mrs. Wuf, the popcorn, and putting up their wolf ears for free throws:

Of course they love the players too, rooting especially for Zoe Brooks, a freshman point guard whose talent and toughness we admire. Reynolds Coliseum, home to the Wolfpack Women’s basketball team (and the wrestling, volleyball, gymnastics, and rifle teams) is a 5,500-seat stadium that first opened in 1949.

I like to remind the girls that other important things happen in this stadium too: graduations, concerts, big speeches. On July 31, 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke here, to a standing-room-only crowd.

“Was Dr. King a Wolfpack fan?” Harriet wanted to know.

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “He came to give a speech, and talk to people about peace and fairness.”

This historic event was nearly forgotten until my colleague Dr. Jason Miller, who discovered the first recording of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, began digging into the archives at the request of the university. Miller found photographs and reporting from an NC State student newspaper, and held public events and talks sharing the broader, more difficult context that suggests why we didn’t celebrate this event: On the same hot July day that Dr. King spoke to more than 5,000 people at Reynolds, 1,800 members of the Ku Klux Klan—including many white women and white children—marched in Raleigh.

“Nobody really wanted to revisit that history,” Miller says in a new, short documentary contextualizing Dr. King’s visit and the unequal news coverage of the Klan, whose march—designed to intimidate King and his audience—made bigger headlines in local papers.

Newspaper and archival news coverage of the white-robed Klan members so outpaced the coverage of Dr. King’s speech that it’s easy to understand why so few people working at State today knew about the event. The Raleigh News and Observer sent eight photographers to cover the KKK march, and no photographers to Reynolds.

Reflecting on this imbalance, Dr. Joanne Woodward quotes a former colleague, who used to remind her, “Until lions have their own historians, the tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

As painful as it is, it’s also important to know how many people marched in Klan robes—in broad daylight, their faces uncovered for all to see. Toni Harris Thorpe, former director of the NC State African American Cultural Center, says “when you know about it, you can take some of the fear back.”

But the complex story of this event, and how it’s been forgotten and mischaracterized by the archives, continues to evolve! After seeing Miller’s 2020 exhibit about King’s speech, a Raleigh resident named Marshall Wyatt contacted Miller about his dad’s meticulous collection of Super 8 film. His father not only recorded part of the Klan’s march, but also some of Dr. King’s speech. He did this not by going to Reynolds but by training his camera on the family’s television set, which broadcast the speech. According to Miller, this is important evidence that Dr. King, in fact, made a bigger impact than the Klan. Many thousands of people watched his speech at home.

Miller says that you don’t have to look far, or long ago, to see the impact of Martin Luther King: “The history of Martin Luther King is near and within reach.”

This is true of so much important civil rights history—it’s close at hand if you know where to look.

Here are a few local-to-us ideas, all great for a day trip:

-Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Museum is a great place to start. It’s located at the site of the historic Woolworth’s sit-in, and open tomorrow for Martin King Day.

-Just east of Greensboro is the Charlotte Hawkins Brown museum, a museum that commemorates a boarding school for African American boys and girls that operated from 1902 to 1971. (I took a 5th grade class to this site in 2007 when we were studying educational history, and they loved it.)

-It takes a little more planning, but Bea and I learned so much during our visit to the underground railroad site in Guilford County.

-In Durham, you can go on a walking tour of Black history with the Hayti Heritage Center every first Saturday in April, May, and June (and September, October, and November).

-And if you want to learn more about Dr. King’s visit to Reynolds, and the Klan threats (and anti-Klan counter-protests) that happened in response, you can see an immersive exhibit this Wednesday, January 17, at Hill Library on NC State’s campus. Featuring Dr. Miller’s research in a cool round gallery, this ten-minute show (and the film above) was curated and directed by Margaret Baker, PhD Candidate in NC State's Communication, Rhetoric & Digital Media program. The event is free and open to the public.

-Our friends Julie, Emmet, and Arley reminded us that you can also get involved in a service project in honor of Dr. King, and bring his legacy right into your life. We signed up to create care packages for the CORA food pantry tomorrow. You can also check out these other local events and service opportunities.

Happy MLK Day, Frog Troublers! Hope you stay warm this week.