MLK Vignettes: UW student met Martin Luther King on 1962 campus visit

In March of 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. missed a connection in Chicago and by the time his flight arrived in Madison, he had to go straight to the Wisconsin Union Theater and give his speech.

Waiting on the stage that night was James Ehrman, a University of Wisconsin-Madison senior who helped coordinate King's visit. The memory of King's visit remains vivid 56 years later.

"The immediate effect was, I guess, spine tingling," said Ehrman, now 77. "Hearing his call for racial (and) social justice, asking that America redeem its promise of freedom and equality for all, a message delivered in a cadence and timbre unique to this minister-of-God, this was the nearest I'll ever come to hearing a voice from the Burning Bush."

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Ehrman, who now lives in Maryland, had tried to arrange a visit by King to the University of Wisconsin campus several months earlier, but those plans were scuttled when the civil rights leader was arrested in Albany, Ga., during a demonstration to protest the segregation of public facilities.

King's 1962 visit, which was organized by the Union Forum Committee, was rooted in a tragedy. Jonas Rosenfeld, a committee member and UW student, was killed Dec. 16, 1960, when United and TWA airliners collided in mid-air in New York.

His parents commemorated Rosenfeld's interest in the Union Forum Committee by funding a lecture series in his memory. A photographer snapped a picture of Ehrman standing next to King as he signed the Jonas Rosenfeld Memorial book.

Though Union Forum Committee members missed out on having dinner with King before the speech, they were able to spend time with him following the lecture. After the meeting, Ehrman walked King from one end of Memorial Union to his hotel room at the other end.

King's visit was the highlight of Ehrman's final semester in Madison.

Ehrman graduated a few months later with a degree in political science and joined the U.S. State Department. A Madison native, he spent 37 years in the foreign service before retiring in 2002. He specialized in labor matters in his last five assignments — in Brazil, India, Philippines and Italy, then heading the department's Office of International Labor Affairs. 

He was stationed at the American embassy in Rome when he learned of King's assassination on April 4, 1968.

"It seemed surreal, that such things could be happening back home, and all I could do was read about them," said Ehrman.