It was a cold Friday evening on January 22, 1960. Dr. King was invited by the Student Religious Council to be the featured speaker during the Religion-in-Life week’s events. Fifteen hundred people heard him speak that evening, many in the Great Hall, and others listening to the speakers that had been set up at various locations inside the Union to accommodate the overflow crowd.

Described as the internationally recognized humanist, Dr. King was 30 years old at the time of his visit. He had earned three degrees and received five honorary ones, as well as 37 other major awards and citations.

Dr. King began by talking about having been in Africa when the new nation of Ghana was born, and how on the night the British flag was lowered and the new flag of Ghana was raised, he realized he was witnessing an old age passing away and a new age beginning. And while he recognized the issues there were colonialism and imperialism, he compared those to segregation and discrimination in our country. That was the old age that needed to pass away in America for a new age to begin.

I was fascinated to read his speech, and see his tracing of the historical elements that began to transform the lives of Negroes, as Blacks were referred to then. He largely linked the opening vistas to the ability to travel. To move from the rural plantation to the industrial centers of the country, the possibility of owning an automobile, and even the two world wars that, while terrible, provided opportunities to see and experience a whole new world.

Likewise, organized labor and other social agencies also made things more possible than ever before. Dr. King had a wonderful example of how things had changed. He compared his trip to Paris the year before, which took 14 hours, to the one he had just made which took only seven. He said he’d realized that a woman could now get up on Saturday morning, go to New York, fly nonstop to Paris, buy a little Evening in Paris perfume and an outfit, and be back on Sunday in time to wear it to church. His point in this was how the world had changed. He said it had become “geographically one” but now the challenge was to make it spiritually one.

The other challenge that he pointed out, that is so relevant for a scientifically-oriented community like Ames, was to keep our moral progress abreast with our scientific and technological progress.  He reminded us that, as he said it, civilization is what we use, culture, what we are. He wanted us to recognize, I think, that technology and all it makes possible provides the how of our lives, but it’s culture and all that encompasses that gives us the “why” of our lives—what we value and how we express it.

He wanted to be sure that we place an equal value on human and social relations as we pursue all the progress that science has to offer.

Dr. King also spoke about his belief in nonviolence, and why he advised other Blacks to love those that were opposing them and seeking to defeat them. He explained by breaking the word love down into its three different forms according to the Greek language. He began with eros, which he described as a kind of ecstatic and romantic love. Shakespeare, he said, was speaking of eros when he wrote Sonnet 116, which begins Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove….   He said he could remember the words of the sonnet because he used to quote them to his wife when they were courting.

He next spoke of filia, or the affection between personal friends, a love based on liking and because we are loved back. But what he saw as most applicable to what he was trying to communicate to his follow-ers, and those attempting to understand him, was the concept of agape. That is the spontaneous love of one person for another, seeking nothing in return. He described it as an overflowing love, a love people extend to each other because they recognize that is how God loves people.

Dr. King believed that in this way we could still love the person while hating his or her deed. This was the kind of love he believed would carry an individual through the struggle, and this love that was the foundation of his principle of nonviolence.