Feb. 25, 1978
Members of Alpha Kappa Alpha on the lower Eastern Shore wanted to celebrate the national sorority’s 70thanniversary in a spectacular way in 1978, so they invited a high-profile guest to their party.
During the last weekend of February that year, Coretta Scott King came to the Lower Shore, where she received the key to the City of Salisbury and was guest of honor at a luncheon on the University of Maryland Eastern Shore campus.
She delivered a talk to what a local newspaper described as a capacity crowd at the 1,200-seat Ella Fitzgerald Center for the Performing Arts.
A snapshot from that day, Feb. 25, shows Mrs. King emerging from the Student Development Center, the site of the Saturday luncheon, with Omega Moore Jones Frazier (Princess Anne Academy class of 1926) at her side.
Mrs. King’s visit warranted articles in The (Salisbury) Daily Times and the Marylander and Herald, a weekly newspaper published in Princess Anne. The first paragraph of the Marylander and Herald article conveys an uplifting tone, describing Mrs. King as “the celebrity of celebrities” who endured “a tiring, whirlwind two days of events.”
The AKA graduate chapter, Delta Sigma Omega, and the UMES undergraduate chapter, Alpha Omicron, sponsored the sorority’s Founders’ Day activities. Luncheon proceeds went to support the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change founded by Mrs. King in 1968, the year of her husband’s assassination.
The UMES speech by Mrs. King, an honorary AKA member, amplified her husband’s mantra as the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights leader. She pointed out Native Americans, Hispanics and farmers had emerged as voices also demanding “human rights.” She also mentioned a need to support the cause of women’s rights.
Mrs. King urged the audience to prod Congress to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978, federal legislation that prohibited discrimination based on gender, religion, race, age and national origin in any (jobs) program created under the act.
And just as her husband did, she challenged listeners to register to vote, the Marylander and Herald reported, which quoted her as saying “the ballot is a powerful tool at everyone’s disposal.”
Friday evening prior to her UMES visit, Mrs. King attended an invitation-only reception in Salisbury that drew by an estimated 200 people.
Credited with organizing the festivities were Mrs. Frazier, identified as the Delta Sigma Omega chapter president at the time; Ruby Holland Lynk, a past president; and members Mary Chapman and Mary Fair Burks, a UMES English professor. Professor Burks was friends with Dr. and Mrs. King when they lived in Alabama in the 1950s, where a bus boycott in Montgomery helped spark the Civil Rights movement.
