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Message still rings true, King friend says at Bethel
Harding visits 50 years after King, whose speech is heard again after tape is found
By Melanie Zuercher Bethel CollegePage:
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NORTH NEWTON, KAN. — In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the stage in Memorial Hall at Bethel College and told his listeners they needed to be “maladjusted.”
Vincent Harding greets Zona Galle and her husband, Omer, of Liberty Hill, Texas, whom he had not seen for many years before visiting Bethel College Jan. 16-18. Harding called the Galles “two of my co-conspirators.” All three were part of Woodlawn Mennonite Church, an interracial community in Chicago, in the 1950s. — Photo by Vada Snider/Bethel College
Fifty years later, his friend and coworker Vincent Harding stood on the same stage to say the message remains the same.
“It’s magnificent to remember 50 years later the presence here of that marvelous human being, Martin Luther King,” Harding said. “But I’m also trying to suggest that remembering him from 50 years ago is not enough in 2010.
“The best way to stay in touch with that man and his visit here is to keep asking ourselves: ‘Now, where would he be encouraging us to go from here?’ ”
Harding, professor emeritus of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, first met King in 1958 when Harding was part of a small interracial group traveling across the South that stopped in Montgomery, Ala., to visit with King.
Harding and his late wife, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, later moved to Atlanta, where they worked with King. In 1967, Harding drafted a speech that opposed the war in Vietnam and that King delivered in New York exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Harding’s visit — his fourth to the Bethel campus since late 1959 — was part of Bethel’s annual celebration of the King holiday, which this year included marking the 50th anniversary of King’s speech in 1960.
Harding’s address on Jan. 18 capped a day of remembering the historic occasion of King’s speech, as well as the remarkable recovery of that speech.
In the afternoon, an overflow crowd filled both the seats and the stage of Krehbiel Auditorium to listen to the speech played in its entirety. Sondra Bandy Koontz, Bethel vice president of advancement, recalled that when planning began for the celebration, she was devastated to learn that no recording or transcript of the speech was known to exist.
“The speech was what we had planned to build the whole day around,” she said.
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