The year was 1966. Dr. Robert L. Green was in the front passenger seat of a car driving through Belzoni, Miss. With him was Andrew Young, the future mayor of Atlanta and a future congressman. In the backseat was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the famed civil rights leader.
“We were in the car… and James Belk, the owner of the Texaco station, was pumping gas,” Green recalled. “We stopped at the light. Belk looked up. He saw King. He stopped pumping the gas. He ran up to the car and he pulled his pistol out and he put it up to King’s forehead and he said, ‘Martin Luther King, I’m going to blow your brains out.’ And King turned to him and said, ‘Brother, I love you.’ The guy was stunned. That pistol came down and he put it in his pocket, and he went back to pumping gas.”
“Andy Young said, ‘Martin, why do you do that? One day you’re going to get us all killed.’ And King said, ‘J.F.K. had all sorts of protection. When they are ready for me, they are going to get me.’”
These are the kinds of memories that swirl in Green’s head. He had a front row seat to some of the most intense and pivotal moments during the Civil Rights Movement as a prominent leader during that tumultuous era and the decades that followed.
Today, he is a 90-year-old retiree living quietly in Ashburn’s Brambleton neighborhood with his wife of 67 years, Lettie, and two of his three adult sons.
Click here and head over to the Ashburn Magazine website to read the rest of Dr. Green’s amazing life story — how he came to work with Dr. King, how he faced off against a train conductor driving through a crowd of hundreds of protesters, and how he helped desegregate East Lansing, Michigan when real estate agents refused to sell him a home.