BLACK HISTORY | LIFE LESSONS
Dr. King, White Catholics, and Me
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but meeting the great civil rights icon would eventually help me through a crisis of faith.
It is impossible to talk about meeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., without mentioning that my father died of a heart attack two months into my freshman year in college.
I received word on a wall-mounted telephone in my dorm. At the end of the call, I crossed the quadrangle and disappeared into De LaSalle Chapel to pray.
When I got back to the dorm,
I soon found myself sitting across from Brother Luke Salm, the monk in charge of my floor. “Your dorm mates have chipped in to buy you a roundtrip plane ticket to Atlanta,” he said.
I packed quickly. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to return to college, but I would find a way to thank them whether I did or not.
Felicia Jeter —
who would one day become an Emmy Award-winning network news anchor — had been my girlfriend from the time we were in grade school. When she learned about my father’s death, she flew home from Mundelein College in Chicago and grieved with the rest of my family.
