The Rev. Dr. Luther Ivory will always remember the evening of Thursday, April 4, 1968.
He and his sister were riding in a pickup driven by his adoptive father on their way to clean the New Harvest Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. They were listening to a gospel song by Mahalia Jackson when a news bulletin broke on the radio. The announcer said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot.
“You could’ve cut the silence in that truck with two machetes,” says Ivory, professor emeritus at Rhodes College. “I saw my father cry only two or three times in my life. This was one of them.”
Ivory, then 15, immediately thought of the previous night when he attended the rally where King delivered his famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple in Memphis.
He and a few members of the Bungalow Braves, a local gang he had been “running around with,” were there to break into the cars of those in attendance. When bad weather forced everyone inside, Ivory heard the words that would eventually change his life.
“I didn’t have much faith in the church or politicians,” Ivory says. “Suddenly, here’s this man quoting Aristotle, Shakespeare and William Cullen Bryant… He was saying that we must love everyone. But, more importantly, he was saying that we must first love ourselves. It’s existentially impossible for you to love others if you can’t love yourself.”
Ivory will share his knowledge and unique insights during Wofford College’s King Day observance as he delivers his talk “The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a Prophetic Dreamer,” at 11 a.m. Monday, Jan. 15, in Olin Theater in the Franklin W. Olin Building.
“Dr. Ivory is a passionate and dynamic speaker,” says Dr. Dwain Pruitt, Wofford’s chief equity officer and vice president for community initiatives, who previously worked with Ivory at Rhodes. “He is a tremendous resource and I think our audience will really enjoy this talk.”
Ivory earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Tennessee, his Doctor of Ministry from Union Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. He served in the U.S. Navy and is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Ivory joined Rhodes College in 1997. He retired in 2018 as an associate professor and director of African American studies.
He has authored the books “Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement: The Theological Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “The Rhythm of Discipleship.” Both are available for purchase on Amazon.com.
“Every year, we hear many of the same stories around the King holiday,” Pruitt says. “I invited Lu to speak because he will discuss Dr. King as a thinker and a theologian, which is something that can get lost in the mythology surrounding him. But it’s such an important part of his legacy.”