Martin Luther King Jr.'s Hofstra University commencement speech in 1965 called on students to be 'involved participants' in history

In 1965, three months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared from the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, that the aim of the civil rights movement was no more and no less than "a society that can live with its conscience," he traveled to Hofstra University on suburban Long Island.

The purpose of the June 13 visit was to attend Hofstra's commencement ceremony, accept an honorary doctor of laws degree from university president Clifford Lord and give a speech. 

A "poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance" afflicts the world, King told the graduating class, according to a transcript in Hofstra's archive. Adept but aimless, we are unequipped to face the three intertwined "evils" of our age: racial injustice, poverty and war, King continued. The solution to these problems is "dependent on man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony," he said. "Let us not be detached spectators or silent onlookers, but involved participants." 

In a partial recording of the speech uploaded to YouTube, King’s delivery is measured and there is little hint of the audience’s reception, aside from polite applause at the end.

But the three evils would not have been abstractions for this graduation crowd of 7,000. Many would have seen news coverage of assaults and killings of nonviolent marchers by police and others that occurred in the weeks before King's Montgomery appearance, including the melee by state troopers using clubs and tear gas at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The spectacle confronted Americans with the reality of racial segregation and helped build support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson would sign into law that August.

Calling for 'righteous indignation'

King alluded to attacks on demonstrators, then spoke directly to the people sitting in Hofstra's bleachers who might have  condemned the violence: "It is just as important for the white person of goodwill in the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a Negro cannot get a job in your particular firm, or when a Negro cannot join your particular professional or academic society, your fraternity or sorority."

Johnson’s War on Poverty, a package of legislation, programs and tax cuts outlined in his 1964 State of the Union address, is referenced elsewhere in the speech and would also have been fresh in listeners’ minds. Finally, in 1965, as the number of Americans fighting in Vietnam climbed from a few thousand troops to nearly 190,000, threatening wider conflict with the Soviet Union and China, King’s warning on war in general and specifically "this terrible, ugly conflict in Vietnam" would have been dire, especially at Hofstra, whose ROTC program later drew student protests.

Besides the transcript, Hofstra’s records contain ephemera both mundane and heartbreaking. Dora McDonald, King’s secretary, writes to Lord, the university president, to courteously decline his offer for King and his wife to spend the night at his house, and to give the civil rights leader’s measurements for his cap and gown: 5 feet, 7 inches tall, 168 pounds, 7¼ hat size.

Lord, ever congenial, writes to a Brooklyn man who took the apparently unusual step of signing his name to a letter faulting Hofstra for honoring King, alleged by some to be a Communist: "I personally am persuaded that his doctrine of Christian non-violence, Christian love and Christian reconciliation between the races is the only possible long-run solution to our present problems. It would be surprising if Communists have not attempted to associate themselves with him in one way or another, as they always do with any movement which promises controversy. ... Again my thanks for your courtesy in signing your name to your letter."

Lord to Coretta Scott King after her husband’s 1968 murder: "We were very proud at Hofstra that your husband was an honorary alumnus. ... Seeking to honor him in a genuinely meaningful way, our Trustees have now voted unanimously to offer free tuition, room and board, to any or all of the children." The archives do not include her reply.

A historic figure on the rise

In 1965, King was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate attracting attention from national media (to say nothing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been monitoring him for a decade, alarmed by his prominence and his advisers' alleged ties to the Communist Party).

What brought him to a mostly white suburban institution of about 9,000 students that was growing rapidly but had attained university status only two years earlier? Mostly, it seems, King’s lawyer, Harry Wachtel, who was friends with a university trustee and who would later teach there. (Hofstra’s records of King’s visit include documents from Wachtel’s personal papers, later donated to the school).

"King often spoke at colleges and universities across the country, and the speaking fees from those events helped keep the Southern Christian Leadership Conference financially operational," David Lai, assistant editor at The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, wrote in an email. (The Hofstra records Newsday reviewed do not mention any honorarium.)

Hofstra’s leaders, and King and his allies, might also have seen strategic benefits to the engagement.

Hofstra was "relatively small and it had only been 30 years since our founding," Cornell Craig, Hofstra’s vice president for equity and inclusion, said in an interview. "I think this was an opportunity to connect with an institution that was in a process of growth. It didn’t have that long of a history but ahead of it, hopefully, was ... connecting with the vision that King spoke of for the world that was to come, and connecting the university with that future."

The student body, composed of mostly white, middle class or affluent Long Islanders in 1965, Craig said, would grow and diversify. Hofstra would hire two high-ranking Black administrators in 1968, becoming one of the first higher learning institutions on Long Island to do so. Lord, speaking to Newsday after one of those men, Edward King Jr. — no relation — was named assistant to the president, said the new hire would concentrate on fundraising for university programs aimed at "educationally deprived" students, a $1 million initiative.

If King had deeper reasons to visit Hofstra than doing a favor for Wachtel, they might have had something to do Long Island itself, then booming as a refuge for white flight from New York City. Its 1965 population was 96% white, with many non-white residents concentrated in neighborhoods of Hempstead and Babylon.

In summer 1965, according to the King Institute, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began planning their Chicago Campaign, expanding their focus from the South to northern cities. Lai, citing the City University of New York political scientist Jeanne Theoharis, wrote that King, who’d attended seminary in Pennsylvania, had "always been familiar with national racism. ... Even before 1965, King also frequently pointed out that the North's de facto segregation was also something that needed to be addressed."

Racial injustice on Long Island

King and his allies may have seen Long Island as a test ground for that theory. The Supreme Court was soon to take up a case over a plan to reduce racial imbalance in Malverne elementary schools, a case other districts were following closely, Newsday reported at the time. In the months before his Hofstra speech, King made at least one other visit to Long Island, a one-day May tour of about five Nassau County sites that an organizer from the Congress of Racial Equality, an advocacy group that had been active in the school cases, said had been designed to "show him some of the slum areas and segregated schools and apartment houses on Long Island."

Aside from Newsday, local media gave scant attention to King's Hofstra appearance. Newsday's coverage, along with that of the national wire services, devoted as much or more attention to the shouted accusations of King's communism from about a dozen protesters than they did to the content of his speech. 

Led by a now deceased Garden City dentist and identified variously as the Long Island Committee To Preserve Our American Freedom or the Ad Hoc Committee To Expose Communist Infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement, the protesters called King "the most notorious liar in America," repeating almost verbatim a claim FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had made about King in a 1964 press conference. Lai, at the King Institute, said that "by 1965 multiple right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society circulated claims that King was at least influenced by Communists if he himself was not," and that disruptions at King's public events were "unfortunately common." King was not a communist, according to scholars. 

Many of the students who attended that June commencement are now in their 80s. Petera Mironchik, 82, a retired teacher from Dix Hills, said in an interview that she remembered little from the speech, partly because of the excitement at that time in the rest of her life: she was newly married and looking forward to a friend's marriage the next day. "I was the first to graduate from college in my family," she said. "My parents, in-laws, and my grandparents were there. It was just a very happy, happy time." Later, when the pace of her life eased, "I was aware what was going on with him with the marches, and of course the assassination. That was horrific ... you were a little more aware."

King's Hofstra speech does not resound as loudly in history as his "I Have a Dream" speech made earlier from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or the haunting "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address, delivered in 1968 to an overflow crowd in Memphis. But King at Hofstra was unmistakably himself, using rhetorical tools of cadence, repetition and figurative language familiar now to generations of Americans.

"I still have faith in the future," he told the graduates. "I still have faith in America. Even on the question of racial injustice, I somehow have the faith to believe that we will one day solve this problem. ... I know that there are difficult days ahead. I know there are dark and desolate nights before us. … The challenge ahead is to work for this bright day."