Martin Luther King Jr. at SMU

Students invited him, and the event was closed to the public. Faculty and students filled the balcony and aisles of the 2,700-seat auditorium. Student senator Charles Cox recalled that King spoke about an hour without a note. SMU Libraries lists the ground he covered: integration, the Dred Scott decision, Aristotle, unemployment, voting rights, Scandinavian social systems, the Civil Rights Bill and communism. SMU alumnus Jerry LeVias, the first Black scholarship football player in the Southwest Conference, later called meeting King a highlight of his life.

What the plaque says

Martin Luther King Jr. at SMU SMU students were becoming more active in civil rights when at least 50 traveled from Dallas to march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. A few months later, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepted an invitation to the campus from the SMU Student Senate. On March 17, 1966, he spoke to a crowd of 2,700 at McFarlin Auditorium. Citing history and longstanding challenges, he listed practical reasons why segregation should end. Dr. King received a standing ovation in his first Texas visit to a predominantly White university. His speech influenced many to engage in movements for equality on campus, in their city and in the nation. (2021)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 4.0 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Fair Park — 4.6 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 4.7 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 4.7 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Highland Park Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• Preston Road — 1.3 mi
• Dr. Marcellus Clayton Cooper — 1.4 mi
• Flippen Homestead and the Founding of Highland Park — 1.5 mi