Dr. King was invited to speak at Saint Peter’s Michaelmas Convocation by the board of trustees, with the main push coming from Jesuit Father Victor Yanitelli, the president at the time. Held at the beginning of the school year, the Michaelmas Convocation is an annual celebration honoring student and faculty with awards as well as featuring a guest speaker.Saint Peter’s awarded Dr. King with an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws and Letters. After receiving the honorary degree, Dr. King spoke on the evils of inequality and how segregation was in opposition of democracy.
When Martin Luther King visited the White House on June 22, 1963, President John Kennedy took him on a private walk in the Rose Garden and urged him to cut his personal and organizational ties to both Stanley Levison, a white businessman and lawyer who was a close confidant, and Jack O’Dell, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staffer who had been hired on Levison’s recommendation, on the grounds that they were Communists. Levison had been a central figure in party financial activities. Not only was he the source of a big chunk of money bundled from Communist-leaning businessmen, he was also actively involved in laundering party funds.
A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era.
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