“We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”
The largest crowd ever to attend an event at William Pitt Union turned out on Nov. 2, 1966 to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during his only official visit to the University of Pittsburgh.
On two previous occasions, the famed civil-rights leader had spoken at “Freedom Jubilees” at nearby Forbes Field, the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, on the site of today’s Posvar Hall. Celebrities such as Jackie Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Roberto Clemente and Count Basie accompanied King on those visits during the summers of 1960 and 1961.
As King entered the ballroom in 1966, a crowd of faculty and students rose to its feet to greet him. Hundreds of people lined the corridors and stairways, listening to his remarks over public address speakers. Later estimates put the total crowd inside and outside the building at 1,000 to 2,000 people.
With the Vietnam War raging and college-age men being called up for military service, King spoke not just of civil rights and integration, but also about economic justice and what he called the unfairness inherent in the draft system.
King noted that although Black Americans made up only 10 percent of the nation’s population, Black men represented about 40 percent of combat troops in Vietnam.
“It may not be a conscious thing, but it goes back to the economic problems in the country,” he said.
America, King said, could not afford to continue to live with hard-core centers of poverty around the country. “I don’t see any answer to the problem until we meet it on a massive scale,” he said. “We must spend as much on the war on poverty as on the other war.”
King was invited to speak as part of the Pitt Public Affairs Midday Lecture Series. Following his almost hour-long speech, titled “A World in Transition,” the crowd got to its feet again for an extended ovation.
It would be King’s last visit to Pittsburgh prior to his assassination in 1968.
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