Connecticut Civil Rights News

Civil Rights Leader Received Honorary Degree At '61 Commencement

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 32-year-old national civil rights leader in 1961. He chose the University of Bridgeport for his first visit to Connecticut on March 16 to give the Frank Jacoby Lecture. He was in good company, having been preceded as lecturers in earlier years by Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, the United Nations ambassador and at the time the highest ranking black in U.S. government, and the best known clergyman of the time, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. King’s speech was electrifying. His words received thunderous applause. Here was a black man winning over his nearly all white audience at a time when half of America was still segregated by practice, not by law, and many communities in the North had yet to experience anything near the integration we have today.

“I didn’t know who he was, really, but I was so impressed by his speech,” Robert DiSpirito, a professor of recreation science and a football and head baseball coach, said. “He spoke with such emotion. I was moved by it personally. I wanted to thank him and let him know he reached me.” King made a second trip to Connecticut and UB in June, this time to receive an honorary doctorate at commencement. He was not the speaker but he used the trip to address community groups in Bridgeport and Hartford and hold news conferences. The writer and novelist John Hersey, author of the monumental work on the dropping of the atomic bomb, “Hiroshima,” gave the commencement address on behalf of the recipients. Besides King and Hersey, the historian Charles McKew Parr, who wrote about the voyages of Magellan and explorations of Marco Polo, and was a high ranking diplomatic and trade official in government, and Henry Richardson Labouisse, a lawyer, diplomat and relief expert with the World Bank who later, as executive director of UNICEF, won the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize — a year after King won his — received honorary degrees.
 
Charles Petitjean, professor and chairman of Marketing in the College of Business and a faculty member from 1945 through 1966, was assigned to be host for Dr. King. It involved picking up the honoree at the train station and accompanying him throughout the ceremony, introducing the recipient and reading the citation, and helping with the doctoral hooding. “MLK was very much in the news...as leader of the civil rights movement, subject to demonstrations. He’d already been stabbed in the South,” Dr. Petitjean wrote in the recollection for his children that he later shared with us for this article. He is now 90 and living in North Carolina.

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