Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Occidental College

January 16, 2023

I am touched to receive an email from our current president of Occidental College, President Harry Elam, today. He addressed to us about the college’s connection to Dr. King. Below is an excerpt from his campus email.

On April 12, 1967, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Occidental, invited by President Richard Gilman, as part of his efforts to increase the campus’ consciousness of the Civil Rights struggle and to express the need for more students of color at the College. Before a packed crowd in Thorne Hall, Dr. King delivered an address he called “The Future of Integration.” Dr. King reached back to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which established the pernicious doctrine of “separate but equal” and, as Dr. King detailed, laid the groundwork for the history of legal segregation into the twentieth century. A critical theme of his talk before that rapt Oxy audience was one of interconnectedness, that, “Yes, we are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”