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As one of only two Negroes attending Los Angeles Baptist College (now Master's College), Dolphus Weary was having the time of his life experiencing a new world of white faces and middle-class culture. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, Weary had assumed he would spend the rest of his life there—until a recruiting team offered him and a friend a chance to attend a Christian liberal arts college in southern California. Other Christian schools that Weary had been interested in refused admission to Negroes. But through the urging of a bold admissions director and an ambitious basketball coach, this ultraconservative institution agreed to make Weary and his friend the first blacks who attended in its 30-year history.

Weary earned above-average grades (knowing anything less would be unacceptable) and helped lead the school's basketball team to a 19-and-5 record. Things were good. The poverty and provincialism of Negro life in southern Mississippi were out of sight, out of mind. Weary was glad to have escaped it—that is, until the day's big news made its way across campus.

As Weary left the library on April 4, 1968, a white student approached him and said, "Did you hear? Martin Luther King got shot."

"I remember running to my room, flipping on the radio, and listening to the news report," he recalls. A rifle bullet had ripped into King's neck as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil-rights leader was rushed to a hospital in serious condition. "I was devastated."

As he sat on his bed holding back the tears, Weary could hear voices down the hall: white students talking about King's shooting. But Weary quickly realized that they were not just talking; they were laughing.

"I couldn't understand what I was hearing," he says. "These Christian kids were glad that Dr. King—my hero—had been shot. I wanted to run out there and confront them." Instead, he steeled his fury and laid prostrate on his bed. Finally, as the newscaster delivered the awful update—"Martin Luther King has died in a Memphis hospital."—Weary could hear the white voices down the hall let out a cheer.

That was 30 years ago. Today Dolphus Weary is the executive director of Mission Mississippi, a Jackson-based community-development ministry that has drawn together black and white Christians throughout the state that King once described as "sweltering with the heat of oppression."

After hearing the white students cheer on that terrible spring day in 1968, reconciliation was the last thing on Weary's mind. "I had to ask God how to respond," he remembers. "It was around the time that H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and other young militant leaders were starting the Black Power movement, and I was tempted to join them. Laughing at Dr. King's death was just like laughing at me—or at the millions of other blacks for whom King labored."

Deep inside, Weary wanted to hate white people, to separate himself from their prejudice. "But then I remembered the heart of Dr. King—responding to hate with love. The Lord brought to my mind that those students were only playing back the tapes that had been recorded in their heads, and I needed to help change the tape."

Weary resolved to "take every opportunity on that campus to help those young minds think differently." He engaged students and professors in discussions about race. He welcomed them to ask him questions about the Negro experience in the South. He rechanneled his anger into building genuine relationships with his white peers.

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March 2 1998, Vol. 42, No. 3