Allen 250 Kick Off Event!!!

For a full list of activities during the week of Bishop Allen's 250th birthday and ways you can celebrate in your own area, click here: http://www.motherbethel.org/Allen250.pdf

"The Day I met Dr. King" : A Mother Bethel Member Remembers

Yesterday at church, our current college students recognized college students from the Civil Rights Movement. Sis. Winnefred R. Bullard shared her own testimony, which is re-posted here in its entirety.

Good Morning, Pastor Tyler, Associate Pulpit Clergy, Officers, First Lady Leslie Tyler, Members, and Friends.

Today, I am extremely proud and honored to be invited to share with you my personal experience of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The day that I met Dr. King added an everlasting meaning to sit-ins and demonstrations.

Actually, some years before I had the opportunity to meet Dr. King, while attending the public schools in Marion, South Carolina, I questioned the structure of segregation. Although, my grandparents and teachers explained and discussed daily, the unjust laws of segregation.

All public places and things were segregated: schools, school buses, public transportation buses, hospital sections, movies, public beaches, neighborhoods, and the list continued.

Therefore, by the time, I enrolled in Allen University, an African Methodist Episcopal church supported School located in Columbia, South Carolina, I was well read and very knowledgeable about Dr. King’s nonviolent stand for justice. I wanted to make a difference and was ready to take a stand for justice; therefore, I joined the student government and became very active. Our student government was very upset about the segregated conditions in the city and the way Black college students were treated. Determined to make a difference, with the help of our professor/campus advisor, we collected the facts about the main segregated movie downtown and planned a strategy of direct action. During my freshman year, two days before Christmas, I along with twenty student government members, peacefully, walked downtown to the movie, bought tickets and sat downstairs in the white Only section. Immediately, the ticket collector ran over and ordered us to go upstairs, but we told him that the ticket did not read

“Sit upstairs”. He told us that coloreds had to sit up stairs. We told him we were college students who knew our rights and we were not moving.

At that point, he said he would call the law on us. We joined hands and started praying. We did not move when the law came; therefore, we were taken bodily out of the movie and told we were going to jail for dis obeying the law. The president of the Student government spoke for all of us…We would all go to jail because we had not disobeyed the law. We were fingerprinted and taken to the State Penitentiary, a prison for offenders of serious crimes.

We prayed, remained brave, and sang “We shall Overcome” from the time we got to prison, until hours later when a Black prison guard secretly told us that Dr. MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. had heard about us and was coming up from Georgia to get us out of prison. We continued to pray and sing all night long.

The next day, Dr. King came to set us free. It was an amazing and joyful time. Dr. King, a tall stately gentleman with a strong confident voice greeted and hugged each one of us. He commended us for recognizing the need to be brave and to personally demonstrate against segregation and injustice. He told us that we had made a great accomplishment and our stand for justice and our values would never go unnoticed. Dr. King took us to dinner and back to campus. When we returned to campus, we formed a big circle with Dr. King standing in the center and we sang, again “We shall overcome”.

From that day to this day, I feel that I made a difference and I will always remember the day Dr. King supported us by coming to the prison himself to get us. Dr. King’s strong spoken words added a lasting in-depth meaning to taking a stand for justice.

By Winnefred Rowell-Bullard

January 17, 2010