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American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, watched by Dr Charles Bousenquet, signs the degree roll At Newcastle University in 1967.
American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, watched by Dr Charles Bousenquet, signs the degree roll At Newcastle University in 1967. Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty Images
American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, watched by Dr Charles Bousenquet, signs the degree roll At Newcastle University in 1967. Photograph: Express Newspapers/Getty Images

Newcastle remembers Martin Luther King’s inspiring visit

This article is more than 6 years old

An exhibition about the US civil rights leader’s trip to the city’s university in 1967 is timely reminder of his values

Paul Barry has a vivid memory of the day Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated. Now in his 60s, Barry was the only black student the civil rights leader met just months earlier during an extraordinary visit to Newcastle to be honoured by the university. Barry was in his first year studying philosophy and psychology. He had already been made photographer of the university paper, the Courier, and took many of the photographs of the event, which for years remained the only record of the day.

“He touched me,” Barry says. “He said you can’t change hearts but you can change laws and I’ve lived by that belief all my life in work, in trade unionism, in Labour politics. He was phenomenal.

“On the day Dr King died, 4 April, 1968, I was on my Vespa when I read a headline at a newspaper stand. I had to pull over because I’d burst into tears. He shaped my life.”

The university is now marking the visit with an exhibition, To Honour A Great and Good Man, which opens on Thursday. It tells the story of how and why the pastor and civil rights leader spent half a day in the city, 50 years ago in November, to receive the only honorary degree awarded to him by a British university.

Newcastle has launched Freedom City 2017 as part of a year-long series of events including theatre, poetry, music, film, art and education to engage Tyneside in exploring the three themes – racism, poverty and war – that King raised in his impromptu speech.

“This day will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen,” King said on 13 November 1967. Less than five months later, aged 39, he was shot dead by James Earl Ray as he stood on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The title of the exhibition comes from the address by J H Burnett, the university’s public orator as he presented King, in red and white robes, with his honorary doctorate in civil law. “This university wishes to honour a great and good man,” Burnett said, “…. because every one of us shares with him the common problem of living with our neighbours and of ensuring the dignity and freedom of all men.”

Fifty years on, Arts Council England has awarded £600,000 to a group of organisations including Newcastle and Northumbria universities, the city council and NewcastleGateshead Initiative, with the aim of making King’s legacy relevant to every citizen, including the so-called “hard to reach”.

Professor Richard Davies, deputy vice-chancellor of Newcastle University, chairs the Freedom City 2017 steering group. “This is more than a celebration, and a pat on the back, it’s a very deep dive into making equality and diversity as much of a reality as we can,” he says. “People will always reflect on moments in their lives when they were inspired.”

Among the events a comic anthology will celebrate Tyneside’s radical civil rights history, which includes John Lilburne, who in the 17th century coined the phrase “free born rights”, influencing the constitution of the US; suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who died after being hit by the king’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby; “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Middlesbrough East in the 1920s; and the Jarrow marchers.

Newcastle has suffered cuts of £300m (45% of its budget) over the last seven years, but the King legacy of social justice thrives, insists Labour council leader Nick Forbes. “I’m a leftwing politician. It’s the role of the state to intervene to give people the chances otherwise denied. Dr King’s themes still have a huge resonance, but today I would also add inequality to war, poverty and racism.”

Nick Nicholson was a maths student and president of the students’ council in 1967. As one of a small group, he had coffee with King and his colleague, Andrew Young, who would become the first black mayor of Atlanta. “Dr King was jet-lagged and tired, but when he spoke at the ceremony you realised why he was the leader of a civil rights movement. All those cadences…”

Now 72 and retired, after working in local government, Nicholson chairs a Norwich charity that supports a community in Dedza, Malawi. “I was the first in my working-class family to go to university,” he says. “Dr King’s words had a resonance for me but even more so in the last 10 years. I see films like Selma and Detroit, I read about Black Lives Matter, we see Charlottesville and I realise, you can’t rely on progress, you have to keep fighting.”

In the months leading up to King’s Newcastle visits, television had revealed to the world the brutality of the US police in dealing with mainly black civil rights protesters. In July 1967, Detroit, now the subject of a Kathryn Bigelow film, went up in flames. “Race Wars Flare Across America,” reported the Newcastle Journal on 24 July.

At a time of high tension in the US, why did King accept the Newcastle invitation out of hundreds? And why did Newcastle University offer him an honorary degree?

As the black power movement promoted militant separatism of African Americans, King advocated “an inescapable network of mutuality” of the races, nonviolent direct action to tackle discrimination in all its forms. In his famous Letter From Birmingham City Jail, and influenced by Gandhi, he explained this “seeks to dramatise the issue that can no longer be avoided”.

King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott to desegregate public transport and campaigned during a period when Britain too was experiencing race riots in Nottingham and London.

In 1963, he helped to organise the march for jobs and freedom on Washington, because America had “written a bad cheque for its citizens of colour”, at which he delivered his I Have a Dream speech. A year later, at 35, he was then the youngest person to receive the Nobel peace prize. So why say yes to Newcastle’s invitation?

Brian Ward, professor of American studies at Northumbria University, is author of the absorbing Martin Luther King in Newcastle upon Tyne, The African American Freedom Struggle and Race Relations in the North East of England, published this month. In 1992, as a junior lecturer at Newcastle University, he discovered television footage of King’s speech. It had always been assumed no record of the speech existed. “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated but behaviour can be regulated,” King expounded. “It may be true that law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can restrain him from lynching me.”

Ward says: “He wasn’t expected to speak but he quilts together bits and pieces from his quiver of phrases used before. And he is peerless at it.”

The invitation was issued because Newcastle felt it needed to signal its progressive character, says Professor Ward, “when British universities… were often hotbeds of progressive ideas and social activism”.

Why did Dr King accept the honorary degree in person? He was plagued by self-doubt and anticipated an early death. Ahead of his time, he had begun to critique capitalism, calling for “the restructuring of the whole of American society”. In April 1967, he had voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War, losing some liberal support. Professor Ward writes: “It was in this context … that the recognition of his efforts from abroad assumed a special significance and therapeutic value. It matters now that we reclaim a radical past that is critical of how power is organised.” He adds: “Morally, ethically and practically Dr King didn’t want to give in to hate.”

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