Shirley A. Jackson - Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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PRESENTER: And I was a child of the King era. I had already applied to grad school and I had been admitted to Harvard, to the University of Chicago, to Brown, to Penn, and to MIT in material science and in physics. So I had visited the Brown and I was visiting Penn the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated. And so thinking about all that I had been through, thinking about the movement that King and others led to open doors, thinking about what I had learned from all of my experiences, and being a pretty good student-- I thought, well, if I stay at MIT, one, I'll certainly get a good graduate education. But two, perhaps I, because I knew the place and had been there, that I could make a difference in having MIT be more open and hospitable to minority students. And so that was a big reason why I stayed.