- Upper School
It is one thing to discuss the enormous impact the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had on civil rights and race relations in this country. No American has ever stood taller or done more good in those areas.
But it is another to have stood by Dr. King’s side in the 1960s, to have walked with him and talked to him and helped him spread the message of non-violent protest and his lifelong goal to have a man judged “By the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.”
Gerald Taylor walked with King and talked to King in the final couple of years of his life before an assassin’s bullet tragically and cruelly took him from us on April 4, 1968, in downtown Memphis. On Friday, January 16, inside McCallie’s chapel, Taylor revisited some of those moments, sharing his memories from that time.
“One thing I don’t think a lot of people saw was his sense of humor,” said Taylor, who was around King on three different occasions. “I don’t know that I can give a specific example. But he had a way of putting you at ease, of defusing a potentially volatile situation with his gentle laugh.”
Much of Taylor’s talk and later meetings with smaller student groups centered on a King mantra: “It’s always the right time to do the right thing.”
Taylor, whose wife Phyllis Craig-Taylor spoke to McCallie on last year’s MLK Day program, first met King when he was just 17, but was already seen as a rising star in the Civil Rights Movement. He was viewed as so important to the movement that the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., as big a star as there was in the 1960s, paid for his plane ticket to attend a NAACP convention.
To better understand Taylor’s remarkable wisdom as an organizer for peaceful change, it’s worth revisiting a podcast he made five years ago about how to bring people of different backgrounds and races together for a common cause.
“It is respect for culture, for people’s culture, and understanding that you start with people where they are, not where you think they should be,” he said. “That you revel in their genius, their experiences, their music, their art, the way they walk and talk and the food they eat.
“You listen to their stories, and if you’re going to build something that’s going to be that complex, you have to create notions of respect across traditions and communities. You’ve got to fight for things that people all are going to benefit from.”
On Friday in the Chapel, he told two stories from his youth in Harlem growing up on 114th Street about doing the right thing. The first involved his grandmother, True Love Beverly.
During a very hot New York City summer, “It was literally hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk,” Taylor said, there arose in his housing project a major dust-up between a girl who believed another girl in the project, a very pretty young woman named Sheila, was stealing her boyfriend.
“Now I was fond of Sheila, but she was out of my league,” said Taylor. “But this was quickly escalating into something bad. My grandmother feared for Sheila’s safety.”
It turned out Beverly was one of the most respected adults in the housing project, however. She stood before the angry mob wanting to harm Sheila and said, “I consider Sheila and her mother part of my family. You leave her alone.” And they almost immediately said, “Sorry, Miss Trudi,” and left.
“My grandmother wasn’t worried about what could happen to her. She was going to do the right thing."
Taylor’s other example of doing the right thing came with a bit of twist. It seems that in his grandmother’s neighborhood, a couple of young punks stole an older woman’s purse and darted off into the night.
The woman shouted at them, “Acts 2:38,” referring to a Bible verse that says, “Repent, and be baptized that every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost”.
However, the robbers didn’t hear “Acts 2:38.” One of the young men turned to the other and said, “We have to take this back. She’s got an axe and two :38 pistols.”
Said Taylor with a grin, “They may have had the wrong reason for doing the right thing, but the woman got her purse back.”
It is an increasingly difficult world to navigate out there, filled with conflicting messages and plenty of people with compromised values.
“There will be moments in your life when you’ll be asked to do the right thing, and it won’t always be the easy thing,” Taylor told the student body. “You’ll have to make that choice. And it can be difficult when those around you don’t want to do the right thing. But as Dr. King said, 'Love God, love your neighbor'.”
“We all have to make a choice about doing the right thing. Dr. King was advised not to go to Memphis, but he believed it was the right thing to do, that he was needed there.”
Taylor paused for a moment, looked across the chapel and said, “Young men of McCallie, you have to choose what kind of person you’re going to be. Don’t screw it up.”
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