King college roommate recalls double-dates with Coretta Scott
Watertown TAB & Press, January 24, 2008
WATERTOWN - The sneeze that wasn't.
Former Perkins School for the Blind professor Hank Santos read this excerpt from the speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the day before his assassination. King talked about a woman stabbing him with a letter opener in Harlem in 1958. The blade came to the edge of King's aorta. The New York Times reported that had King sneezed, the artery would have been punctured and he would have drowned in his own blood."I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.
If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."
Source: Professor Hank Santos and text of speech.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Hank Santos thinks about what could have been.
He thinks about King, his former college roommate, and their time together in Boston.
He thinks about how his friend made history.
"Martin was not just about [ending] racism," said Santos about King, who would have turned 79 years old this month. "He was working for us, the country and the world. It was a much larger vision."
After living with King for six months on Massachusetts Avenue while attending Boston University in the 1950s, Santos became a music professor at Perkins School for the Blind. He taught piano for 18 years.
On Monday, Santos returned to Perkins to share his personal stories of King.
Santos met King as an undergraduate at BU; King was a graduate student studying theology. Santos was looking for a place because neighbors told his landlord they did not want to live next to a black man. But he met King and a fellow student at a college gathering and was invited to live with them.
"We all became friends," he said.
Santos remembers the simple things about King — his love for "down-home cooking," debates on religious thought, and double dates with King and his girlfriend, Coretta Scott.
"[King] was well read," Santos said. "He loved music, poetry, literature…"
Their apartment was one of those places where "students were in and out," reading poems like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," discussing social and political issues, and listening to King quote personal heroes like Gandhi.
"You could see the natural affinity he had for combining many sources," Santos told a packed crowd at Perkins.
Santos compared the racial injustice he witnessed and experienced back then with the ongoing struggles of disabled people. This includes "classroom integration," allowing special needs and disabled students to take advantage of the best education, and be exposed to an "early acceptance" among their peers.
Perkins President Steven Rothstein told the audience that although many things have changed over the past 50 years, there is still "a lot of work to do" combating discrimination and promoting diversity.
"Please remember that today is not just a day to remember, but a day of service," he said. "We need to think about what each of us are doing to ensure an open and just society."
At Perkins, Rothstein said a new diversity council would help to promote accepting differences on campus and in Watertown.
During the Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremony inside Dwight Hall, students from the Lower School Chorus sang "Peace in Many Languages," and toward the end of the event, King's famous "Free at Last" speech from 1963 was played over the loudspeaker.
Santos also recited a King quote that pertained to the teachings at Perkins and the range of students' backgrounds at the school.
"Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create … it must be created by the fact of contact," he said. "At Perkins, we made that contact work."
Many Perkins alumni, and former students of Santos, came to hear him speak.
Rich Chapman, from the Class of 1964, said Santos taught him piano for two years.
"I remember asking him, who is this 'Beeth-hoven'?" Chapman said. "Turns out it was Beethoven. He got a good laugh out of that."
Dennis Brady, president of the Perkins Alumni, said he took piano for seven years with Santos and knew right away what a talent his teacher had.
"We learned a lot from him, but just to listen to him play…," he said. "He took that keyboard and did wonders with it."
After Perkins, Santos went on to teach piano at Bridgewater State College, and both studied and performed his music around the world.
Still today, the memory of his friend and former colleague would always be with him.
"People always ask what they thought Martin would be," he said.
Santos said King's sister, Christine King Farris, has already said it best.
"He was an average and ordinary man, called by a God in whom he had deep and abiding faith, to perform extraordinary deeds," Santos quoted.