Tag: Martin Luther King Jr.

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News

Gaston’s history: Idealism spurred civil rights activist

UVA history professor emeritus Paul Gaston both taught and made Southern history. Laura Branton

When Paul Gaston came to the University of Virginia in 1957, it was overwhelmingly white and male, and segregation was the order of the day. And that’s why the young history professor and early civil rights activist chose it for his life’s work.

He brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Old Cabell Hall in 1963, just weeks before King wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail. That same year, Gaston became UVA’s only professor to get punched and arrested during a sit-in at the staunchly segregated Buddy’s restaurant on Emmet Street.

Professor emeritus Paul Gaston died June 14 at age 91.

Daughter Chinta Gaston remembers her brother Blaise teasing her that “Daddy is in jail.”

She also recalls, “My dad was kicked out of Fry’s Spring [Beach Club] after Buddy’s.” A number of people threatened to leave the club in protest of his ouster, she says, “but Father decided it was wrong to belong to a segregated place. My recollection is we didn’t go back.”

As a white boy growing up in Jim Crow Alabama, Gaston might have seemed an unlikely leader of the civil rights charge. But he was raised in the utopian community of Fairhope, founded by his grandfather, an experience he wrote about in a 2009 memoir.  “I grew up in a community where equal rights and justice were grounding moral principles,” he once told this reporter.

Gaston’s Deep South roots also struck civil rights legend Eugene Williams, who was head of the local NAACP in the 1950s and met Gaston and his wife Mary at a meeting, where they became regulars. Williams says he was “very impressed” when he heard Gaston was at the Buddy’s sit-in.

“I am speaking of a white man, Paul Gaston, born in Alabama, professor at the University of Virginia, and a sure face at civil rights meetings,” says Williams, who also remembers Gaston’s charm during those days of segregation. “And at the end of meetings he would mingle with the attendees.”

Paul Gaston in 2009 at the site of the former Buddy’s, where he was punched and arrested at a sit-in. File photo Hawes Spencer

The ‘60s were cathartic for Gaston. “Life in the 1960s was the most rewarding era I’ve known,” he said in 2005. “I found a community of students who wanted to shake things up. We marched together, we had sit-ins, we had boycotts. I was their leader—I was 30.”

Gaston was offered jobs up north, but chose to stay at UVA, says his youngest son Gareth. “He wanted to teach white Southerners.” Gareth admires the way his father “combined scholarship and activism.”

Gaston taught the South’s history, and wrote The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking in 1970. The book was republished in 2002 and his former student, Robert J. Norrell, wrote in the introduction that it had “stood the test of time as a historical interpretation.”

He helped establish the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies in 1981. And he is credited with wooing civil rights leader Julian Bond to UVA’s faculty.

In the 1980s, he went to South Africa, met Desmond Tutu, and taught a class at the University of Cape Town, says Gareth.

University of Richmond president emeritus Ed Ayers, former UVA dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, recalls that Gaston was a “legend” when Ayers arrived at UVA in 1980.

“I think Paul will be remembered for both writing and making Southern history,” he says.

Chinta notes her father’s optimism and idealism in his belief that he could dispel racism by talking truth. “He was not successful,” she says. Yet he continued to believe “there was a new dawn that would make these poor benighted white people understand.”

He had a great faith in people, says Chinta. He was “endlessly interested in his children and he was nonjudgmental.”

Mary Gaston died in 2013. Gaston is survived by his three children and two granddaughters. A memorial is planned for the fall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Arts

Ascending dreamer: The Mountaintop at Heritage Theatre Festival is one for the heart

Enoch A. King plays Martin Luther King Jr., and Suzette Azariah Gunn is Camae in The Mountaintop at the Ruth Caplin Theatre through August 5.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and several days before the first anniversary of last summer’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, UVA’s Heritage Theatre Festival unveiled its production of The Mountaintop, a play that reimagines the final hours of King’s life and celebrates the humanity of its hero. Written by Katori Hall and debuted in 2009, the story is told anew by masterful director Kathryn Hunter-Williams and presented as a gift: medicine designed to rejuvenate hearts in a hurting community and divided country.

When the lights go down, James Brown is singing. When they go up, we hear rain. It’s April 3, 1968, and the red neon sign of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, glows like a boomerang. Inside Room 306, we see two twin beds, one made up neatly, the other a mess. Crumpled balls of paper dot the carpet; legal pads, pens, ashtrays and coffee pots litter the Art Deco furniture. This is a thinking man’s hotel room.

When King enters, you feel pressure swollen like the humid weight of the storm settle on your shoulders. The tension is high, fraught with dramatic irony, which might be why you laugh so hard when he takes off his shoes, wrinkles his nose and comments aloud about the smell.

Alone with his thoughts, frustrations and persistent cough, the condemned man sheds his pulpit uniform—black suit, brown tie, black shoes—with the resignation of a road warrior. This isn’t the first empty motel room he’s retired to after rekindling hope for a weary and worried audience, but it will be his last. Because the church he exited on this rainy night, the small crowd he complains of to the maid who brings him coffee, was the Mason Temple in Memphis. The speech to which he gave so much energy will come to be known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” a prophetic charge to his people to press on to the promised land, the mountaintop King saw in his dreams, even if he should not make it there with them. He would be shot and killed just 31 hours after delivering it.

So here we are in the motel, trapped between prophesy and martyrdom, listening to the leader of the American civil rights movement urinate (behind closed doors) while we wait for him to die. It’s a testament to the creativity of the playwright and the fine work of this production that nervous tension need only carry us so far. Soon enough the story morphs, unlocking deeper dimensions of attention, rousing us from trainwreck-stupors and absorbing our whole hearts.

Enoch A. King, who plays MLK, brings remarkable range and his own spin to the iconic character. Though his bearing, oratorical skills and mustache evoke an eerie likeness to King, he never attempts to carbon copy him. Instead, he makes him accessible, shifting from tenacity to flirtation to paranoia to bombast, sometimes on a dime. Most remarkable is the way he deepens as the show progresses. By the time he delivers his final speech, you would swear MLK himself was onstage.

Suzette Azariah Gunn’s Camae, a housekeeper tasked with attending to King during her first day on the job, is a seemingly inadvertent companion for his final night on earth. Gunn delivers a powerful performance, matching King’s fiery sermons with her own passionate arguments on changing the world. She, too, is larger than life somehow, speaking on behalf of society: sharing Black Panther beliefs, roasting King’s “bougie“ assumptions, referring to God as a “she” with steadfast conviction, and ultimately carrying a secret set to redeem us all.

Credit goes to Hunter-Williams, scenic designer Raul Abrego, lighting designer Latrice Lovett and sound designer Michael Rasbury for the show’s captivating portrayal of an ordinary world that teeters on the edge of something extraordinary. The whole experience is elevated (and ultimately transformed) by light shifts, clever sets and the explosions of thunder that set King shaking. When the show crescendos, thanks in large part to the crew, it leaves us light years from where we began.

I’m loathe to give away the play’s significant surprises but suffice to say, I cried for none of the expected reasons but because, at the same instant Katori’s plot shed its literal trappings, my mind and heart woke up.

This production is delivered in such a time and place and way that you leave the theater changed. It’s hard to know if you’ve traveled forward or backward in time or simply deeper into yourself, awake and aware and alive, like King himself, until the very end.

Reflecting on the personal costs and challenges of his work, lamenting the misunderstandings he perceives in his followers, King asks in a grief-soaked voice, “Why me?” When Camae rejoins “Why not you?” his answer is ready: “Because I’m just a man.”

The message is clear: No one who changes the world is born with the suprahuman ability to do so. To fight for equality, and keep on fighting, is a brave choice made by flawed humans, and no one is absolved from the responsibility of making that decision.

For evil, as Camae reminds us, is not a who but a what. And 50 years later, the world remains as beautiful and as ugly as King knew it to be. It would appear the mountaintop was never a destination nor permanent citadel but rather a possibility, available in every moment for those who choose to go there.

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News

Gallery Court Hotel rises out of Excel Inn’s ashes

Plans for the new Gallery Court Hotel bear no resemblance to the historic motor court style of the 1950s that the structure replaces. Submitted image

By Natalie Jacobsen

On May 4 of last year, Charlottesville was rocked by the images and news that the long-standing Excel Inn & Suites was ablaze. The Emmet Street landmark was deemed unsalvageable, and the owners, Vipul and Manisha Patel, closed the hotel immediately and indefinitely following the devastating fire.

Now the Patel family has a new proposal, which they brought to the City Planning Commission March 14. They are seeking a special permit to build a seven-story, 72-room, 75,000-square-foot replacement: “a boutique hotel aptly named the Gallery Court Hotel,” says Vipul Patel.

The name recalls Excel Inn’s original name, Gallery Court Motor Hotel, which was erected in 1951. A special permit is required for any building proposal that exceeds 60 feet within Charlottesville city limits. The Patels want an 80-foot ceiling cap.

The Gallery Court Hotel is just one of several proposed projects along the Emmet corridor. The University of Virginia’s Cavalier Inn and The Villa Diner across the street will be razed as part of the area’s makeover.

Patel acknowledged the evolving area, stating in the proposal that the building would be aligned with the exterior vision of surrounding UVA structures.

“The hotel is consistent with the city’s architectural character,” says Patel, and will include expanded pedestrian areas to accommodate students and the growing number
of visitors.

Christine French, an architectural historian and graduate of UVA, says the design “looks just like anything else anymore these days. Monolithic, beige and not following any historical architecture precedents.” Charlottesville removed many older buildings of historical importance in the late ’90s to make way for these modern designs, she says.

Excel Inn’s claim to fame was housing Martin Luther King Jr. during his stay in Charlottesville in 1963 after he was invited to lecture at UVA, when the motel was one of the few places that would accommodate African-Americans in segregated Charlottesville. It is not yet known how, or if, the Patels will acknowledge his visit in
the new design.

Says French, “Excel Inn has never been acknowledged as a landmark for hosting Dr. King. Maybe now the impact of his stay will be taken seriously in a historical context.” She floated ideas of an exhibit or profound commemoration, though without the original building, she says, history is being erased. “Charlottesville is not just about Thomas Jefferson—a lot of movement happened in the ’50s and ’60s. That’s important, too.”

The Patel family acquired the hotel fewer than 20 years after King’s stay, in 1981, from former owners Herbert Monte Jr. and George and Nell Eby, while passing through Charlottesville on a trip.

Despite the 10-month setback from the fire, they are looking at this optimistically. “We find comfort in knowing that this is not the end, but the opportunity for a new beginning,” says Patel.

“The ownership and operation of this family business was our real-life American Dream…owning [it] gave us a purpose and vision for the future,” he says.

For the time being, the Patels will have to wait for their special permit to be granted before they can move forward with the demolition and subsequent construction. No timeline for voting or construction has been announced.