Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to like in BL Classics. Today, we’re remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., honoring the life, legacy, and impact of his tireless activism. This classic article from our May-June 1968 issue chronicles the students’ creation of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholarship fund following his assassination.
Baylor University is not an island. It is no a cloistered-campus-cocoon.
Baylor students are knowledgeable, active U.S. citizens. They believe, mostly, that if they’re being trained to be tomorrow’s leaders they should start today.
The murder of Martin Luther King had about the same effect on the Baylor campus that it did on most American communities. It ignited a variety of opinion. Most Baylor students were appalled that murder again was used as a political weapon – that some of their elders resort to bullets instead of ballots.
Some of the most aroused students came to see President McCall. They asked him to dismiss school for a day, and for him to take part in a memorial service. President McCall approved a one hour break in campus activity for the following day for anybody who wanted to attend a voluntary memorial service.
Then he told the student leaders, in substance: “All the meeting and marching and talking in the world is not going to solve the race problem. Along with a lot of other ‘hidebound conservatives’ I’ve been trying to do something constructive on the matter for years, while most of the ‘concerned liberals’ have been yelling and yacking. That’s what the Negroes themselves denounce as tokenism’.”
“If you really want to do something significant, why not get together a scholarship fund for a Negro ministerial student, either at Paul Quinn College or Baylor,” the president said. “If you can raise some money from some of the so-called liberals, who’ll put up or shut up, I’ll give you $100 myself.”
And that’s how the scholarship fund originated – by some students. And they made sure they got the president’s $100.
And that’s when a few letters began arriving, ranging in tone from sorrowful to sarcastic.
Not all of them were, of course. One morning we got one originally send to Arch Hunt, who directs Baylor’s vast student-aid program. It was from Charles T., a brilliant, neat, National Honor Society Negro high school senior. It was a thank-you letter for a loan that will enable him to attend Baylor University.
It read, in part: “Only God can actually understand the depth of my gratitude to Baylor. I shall be eternally grateful for the opportunity to pursue my education. I was born just a few blocks south of your new library. I attended grade school across from the new girl’s dorm. In school I often looked out of a third-floor window at the expanding Baylor campus. My father was manager of a cleaning shop for 20 years, located where the present math-science building stands. Although I have long lived and attended school in the shadow of Baylor, I little expected to some day attend this university. I humbly accept the financial arrangements; furthermore, I pledge myself to do my very best to be worthy of the confidence expressed by Baylor. I make no vain and rash promises. I can only promise I shall do my best and then some. I am now on the verge of a great challenge. Again, I thank you.”
Maybe we’re wrong, but it sort of brightened up our day around here. . . .
