Vickki Dozier

Lansing State Journal

The night Walter Neller knocked on his door, Robert L. Green had been helping his wife, Lettie, wash the dinner dishes.

It was December 1962, and Green, who had been hoping to take a quick walk or run around the neighborhood, answered the door in gray sweats and tennis shoes.

There was Neller, a leading Realtor in the area, and his wife, Frances.

Neller told Green who he was. Green invited the couple in and offered them a seat. Neller wouldn't sit.

“I just wanted to see who you are,” he said. Or that's the way Green recalls it five decades later.

"I could tell he was upset," Green said.

Green would go on to be a Michigan State University professor, dean of its College of Urban Development and, from 1965 to 1967, the education director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, working and marching with Martin Luther King Jr.

But on that day, he was a graduate student who had just finished work on a doctorate in educational psychology, living in a rented house at 221 Durand St. in East Lansing.

Fifty years ago, black people couldn't buy homes in East Lansing, no matter their relation to MSU. Green and his wife would be the first.

Neller fussed at him, Green said. He told Green there were nice homes on the west side of Lansing. He said, "You’ll bring the property values down.”

Green replied that he worked in East Lansing at MSU and should be able to buy a home in East Lansing.

“He didn’t call me the 'N' word, but he called me a pup,” Green said. "He went into a stance and raised his arm up saying 'I ought to hit you.' When he did, I went into a wrestling stance. He didn't move after that."

At that point Green says, Neller's wife stood up and said they should be going. But the older man had some parting words. “Don't you think for one second, that I’m prejudiced," Neller told him. "Every Christmas I give my black janitor a new suit."

When Green relayed this story to his oldest granddaughter, Kara, she could not believe it. One day, she cornered him.

"'Grandpa, you had a Ph.D. from MSU and you had never been in trouble,' she asked." Green was telling the story. "I said, 'No, I’d never been arrested. I was blessed.’

"‘And you could not buy a home in East Lansing?’ she asked. I said 'no.'

"She pushed me further. She said, ‘And you had a job at the university?' I said, ‘Yes, I had a job at the university.’

‘And you could not buy a home?’"

It was part of the motivation for Green, who is 82, to write his memoir, "At the Crossroads of Fear and Freedom," which was published in November.

He wanted to leave something to his grandchildren, a statement about his family's experiences, so folks would know what things were like. He wanted to leave a record of things other writers have overlooked.

"King did something that no other person in my memory or research has done," Green said. "He drilled, worked, pushed the black community to overcome fear of death. King taught that you should overcome your fear of death and overcome your love of money."

MSU and MLK

Green was a student at San Francisco State College in 1955 when he met King. Green worked driving a cab. When he found out King was delivering the keynote address at an NAACP convention, he took a lunch break and went in to hear him. He describes it as the most remarkable speech on freedom ever.

This was just after the Montgomery bus boycott. King talked about walking and marching for freedom. Green introduced himself afterward. King said he would be speaking in Berkeley in a couple weeks and that Green should attend if he was free. He did.

That's how his relationship with King started.

Green ended up at MSU, he says, because of discrimination. After earning both bachelor's and master's degrees at San Francisco State, along with certification as a school psychologist, Green could not find a job. "I learned quickly that you never put your picture with an application if you're black," Green said.

So he applied to graduate schools. While visiting family in Detroit, he drove to East Lansing . The clincher was Spartan Village.

"I saw that brand new housing, I got a scholarship, a fellowship to teach Education 200 and I was just as happy as I could be at MSU," Green said. "I was on my way, with MSU's support."

A home of their own

There were good people at the university, Green says, who were supportive as his search to buy a home began. MSU President John Hannah was one of them.

Hannah offered to buy a home in East Lansing then sell it to Green. "He was a good man, but I said, 'If you buy a home for me and sell it to me, the next person of color who comes around to buy a home will have the same experience, so thank you, but no,' " Green said.

Jerry Wish, a graduate student, also helped. Wish was white. His family owned a dairy in Ohio. Wish and his wife would go out, find available homes and contact Green. When the Greens would show up, all of a sudden the home would not be available.

"It was interesting as a psychologist, I would often watch the reaction of whites of good will towards race discrimination," Green said. "They would always be shocked. Expectation on my part was that discrimination would occur."

Green and his wife were poor, he said, "and didn’t know much about money." He had $700 in a savings account. When they finally found a house on Bessemaur Drive in 1964, they needed to put down $2,000.

"Jerry Wish went down to the East Lansing State Bank" and brought back money, Green said. "That’s how we got our first house and I paid it back. Wish was way ahead of his time. That was my introduction to life here in East Lansing."

Relationship with King

Green would meet King again in 1965, when he came to the university to speak. King asked Green to consider working for him full-time. And he did.

From 1965 to 1967, Green worked closely with King as the education director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He played a leading role in the Meredith March against Fear, a march through Mississippi in the summer of 1966, named for James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Meredith was shot in the back and the legs on June 6, 1966, while taking part in a voter registration march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The next day, King announced a coalition of civil rights groups would resume his march. Over the next three weeks, thousands would join them.

On a visit to East Lansing in January, Green was asked by an MSU student if he was fearful for his life when he was in Mississippi.

"I was more fearful in East Lansing than I was in Mississippi," he said. "Because you never knew what was going to happen."

King had a sense of humor, Green says, that most people never saw.

"He would say, 'Look, you all are always concerned about my safety. I’m going to be all right. Nothing's going to happen to me,'" Green said. "King said to us, 'You know Andy (Young), one day they're going to shoot at me and they’re going to miss me and they’re going to get you. I’m going to have to preach your sermon.'

"And then he would take 10 minutes preaching Andy Young’s sermon. That's how King dealt with death."

And it seldom seemed far away. Once, in Grenada, Mississippi, a man named James Belk, who owned a Texaco station there, stopped pumping gas when a car King was riding in stopped at a stoplight, said Green, who was sitting behind King that day. Belk reached into his pocket and ran to the car.

"He put a .45 right on King’s temple and said, 'Martin Luther King Jr., I’m going to blow your brains out,'" Green said. "Dr. King turned, looked at him and said, 'Brother, I love you.'

"That pistol came down and Belk didn’t know what to do," Green said. "He put it in his pocket, turned and walked away with his head down. We all watched. I think I had a heart attack in all four chambers."

Green's sons, Kurt and Vince, used to worry that he wouldn't come home, that he would be killed and they weren't going to have a father. That's something Green only learned recently.

"I never knew that my sons were worried about my safety," Green said. "When you engage in acts, no matter good or bad, and these were good acts that I was involved in, your family watches and monitors your behavior. And you do the right thing for the right reason and things will eventually, I think, work out for the good."

As busy as Green was, speaking and traveling with King, he spent a lot of time with his three sons, said his son Vincent Green, a Lansing attorney. His brothers are Kurt and Kevin.

"He was there every Friday night at my football games at East Lansing High School, watching me," Vincent Green said. "On Saturdays, my dad was out there with us, mowing the lawn, clipping, showing us the right way to do it...Dad was almost always there."

The one time he wasn’t, something was terribly wrong. It was the night King was assassinated.

"I was 10, and I played violin," Vincent Green said. "I had a solo that night and kept looking in the audience for my parents."

His mom didn't make it until the concert had ended. His father had already flown to Memphis.

At any given time, Coretta Scott King, Flip Wilson or Arthur Ashe, might be visiting the Green residence. To Vincent, it didn't seem like a big deal. As he got older, he appreciated it more.

But sometimes, with a father as accomplished as Robert Green, Vincent Green said, you felt like you were falling short.

“I’ve never written a book," Vincent Green said. "I’ve met a couple presidents, but have not been to the White House and sat down with one like my dad has. But at the same time, my dad reminded me of something a few years ago. 'How many murder cases have I tried, Vince?,' he asked "I said you’ve tried none." 'He said that’s my point. You’ve tried murder cases. I couldn’t do that."

Mentor to many

"If there was a black at MSU or even in the city of East Lansing, that had a problem and they came to Bob Green, he dealt with it," Maxie Jackson said. "It didn’t matter if it was in his academic unit, if it was in the university or out of the city, if you came and said I’ve got a problem, he dealt with it."

Jackson was the first graduate assistant in the Center for Urban Affairs. Green was the director. It was an exciting time, Jackson said.

Green became the Dean of the College of Urban Development at MSU when it was created in 1972, the first black dean at MSU. He resigned in 1983 to become president of the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C.

Today, Green and his wife live in Las Vegas, but return a few times a year to East Lansing.

Green attended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Luncheon in Lansing on Jan. 18. Later that day, he traveled with Young to the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson, where Young would speak with inmates.

The heavy metal gate shut behind them. A young man who looked to be about 18, mopped the floor in a slow back and forth motion, checking out the visitors. The walk to the gymnasium was about a city block long.

Green introduced his friend of 55 years to 200 inmates, selected because of their good behavior. They sat on the bleachers in the gymnasium wearing bright blue jackets, waiting to hear what Young had to say.

Young told the men that King used to say that what was wrong with us was that we had not spent enough time in jail. That brought loud clapping and choruses of "Yes, yes, talk to me."

"I want you to consider this part of your life, a blessing," Young said as Green sat beside him at a long table. "I know that’s crazy. Consider it a blessing and shake off all the anger, all the frustration, all of the bad things in your life."

Contact Vickki Dozier at (517) 267-1342 or vdozier@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter@vickkiD.