In the 1990s, Dale initiated the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dinner program in Huber Heights, an event that continued for more than a decade and was regularly well-attended, typically upwards of 500 guests.
“I looked around in the community and there was nothing happening for Blacks particularly, and I just thought that needed to change,” she said of planning the first dinner program. “And with (MLK Day), it felt like no one was actually recognizing or seemed to be really appreciating what Dr. King had done. This man gave his life and there needed to be some recognition for that.”
Decades later, a great many communities hold special remembrances of the work done by King, a Baptist minister who was instrumental in the civil rights movement and worked to stop segregation for Black Americans. King was assassinated in 1968.
At an event in Springfield on Friday, Terra Fox Williams, president and CEO of YWCA Dayton, asked the audience to consider their own role, and be a voice for the voiceless. She challenged everyone to act on King’s quote, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty of bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
In Hamilton this weekend, Indianapolis minister Rev. Grady Wicker Jr., urged people to continue King’s dream of a beloved community, and not to wait.
“Now is the time to do right because it’s always right to do right,” Wicker said. “If there’s someone in need, do right. If there’s policy and legislation, do right. If there are injustices, do right.”
Today, people will gather all across the Dayton area to celebrate King. At 7:30 this morning in Centerville, federal Judge Walter H. Rice will discuss what we can all do to honor King’s legacy. At 9:30 in Dayton, crowds will brave sub-zero wind chills for the annual MLK march from West Third Street to Sinclair. At 1 p.m. at Lebanon’s Resurrection Lutheran Church, the theme is “Genuine Brotherhood: Perfect Peace,” and was tied to an effort to replenish the community’s food pantry.
Dale was scheduled to speak at today’s Huber Heights MLK event, but had to cancel due to a family issue. She has seen the world change, since even before King gained prominence.
Born in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1936 to hardworking sharecropper parents, Dale saw firsthand how the world around her left little room for Black prosperity, something that sparked a fire in her from a young age.
“I’m a sharecropper’s daughter, which is not even a step up from slavery, it’s a fourth of a step up from slavery,” Dale said. “We worked on a farm that wasn’t ours, and as I got older, I asked a few questions. What I couldn’t understand is how we were always in debt when we worked the whole year.”
With a mother who received some formal schooling and a father who received none, along with a curtailed early educational experience herself, Dale wanted more for herself and knew she’d have to work to get it.
“I never got a chance to get to school until about October of each year. There were days I’d be at the library and I’d have to go back home and make up my work (on the farm),” she said. “It was a rough time but I just felt at one point that I needed to get out, so I made myself a promise I was going to work as hard as I could.”
Dale worked as a licensed counselor at Huber Heights’ Weisenborn Middle School, and at one point was the only Black employee on staff. Unstirred by this fact, she flourished in her position, creating multiple organizations on campus, including the Concerned Parents Organization to facilitate better relationships with teachers and their students, thereby increasing academic success and cutting down on the rate of student expulsion.
She also established the Black Awareness Club, which gave Black students an opportunity to study and learn about their culture in a positive way rather than through lessons centered on the history of slavery.
Credit: Lisa Powell
Credit: Lisa Powell
Dale shared an incident she witnessed as a child that shaped her both at the time and later on in her life.
“I would go with my father when he went to weigh the cotton from the farm, and when the white man said the weight, I looked at the scale and told my dad they got it wrong,” she recalled.
She reflected on how years littered with unfair treatment can manifest into ongoing, generational feelings that harden with time, making the notion of fighting oppression calmly and peacefully, as King encouraged, a harder task.
“When I see an angry Black person, I feel so hurt because I feel like maybe they haven’t had a chance to release it, you know? Because it’s a hurtin’ thing,” she said.
It was during her time in the Air Force that Dale said she took a race relations training course with fellow service members that helped change the way she thought about race and relationships, lessons she carried through her life and career.
“When I sat (in that class) and now I’m hearing someone saying that I am somebody, and that people are going to have to respect me, it was a big growth for me,” she said. “It gave me confidence, it made me appreciate who I was and I was no longer going to feel like I’m a minority or insignificant.”
Dale claimed her spot at many tables, and is encouraging others to do the same.
Staff Writers Michael Pitman and Brooke Spurlock contributed to this report.
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