Rolling Meadows woman recounts march with King

Rena Trevor admits it was scary when she rode a bus to Montgomery, Ala. in March 1965, ready to stand with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the face of the Ku Klux Klan and others protecting centuries of Southern tradition.

But for the 84-year-old Rolling Meadows woman, the episode was just one in a long career of working for equality.

Trevor has been in the forefront of projects here in the suburbs for migrant workers, African-Americans and women. And she did it all as a suburban wife and mother who never got that local ticket of freedom—a driver’s license.

“I got my principles from my mother and father,” Trevor said. “She was so unprejudiced. When she was in Utah where her father worked in the mines, she noticed how badly the Chinese and the (American) Indians were treated. She talked about that a lot.”

A decade or so after the 1965 march, Trevor relived the story for members of the League of Women Voters. A video recording of that interview will be shown in Arlington Heights tonight in celebration of the King holiday, and Trevor will answer questions about her remembrances of the slain civil rights leader and her role in the movement he led.

The program starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Arlington Heights Historical Society, 110 W. Fremont St. The free public event is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Arlington Heights-Mount Prospect-Buffalo Grove Area.

Trevor walked in King’s third 1965 march from Selma, Ala. to the state capitol in Montgomery as part of the campaign to win voting rights for black Americans. Beatings, police dogs and water hoses stopped the first two marches.

It was the internationally televised images of those marches that led Trevor, her diabetic sister, Mimi Stafford, and as many as 30,000 others to Montgomery to support King and his followers.

“I was watching a movie on television when they interrupted with a newscast from Selma,” Trevor said. “It was just horrible, it was just terrible. I was so incensed I talked about it with some Leaguers from here I knew we were going to go.”

Trevor and the late Stafford drove to Evanston to ride a church bus to Montgomery. The oldest of three siblings and accustomed to protecting her brother and sister, Trevor admits she had doubts when a minister lectured them about not retaliating, even if they were struck.

“We were pledged to nonviolence, of course, but I thought to myself ‘If somebody hits my sister, can I just stand by?’”

“It sounds like a bad novel” Trevor said of the journey into the Deep South. “At 1 a.m. we crossed into Alabama on a stormy night. It was raining, and there was thunder and outside cars were trailing us. We knew they were the Klan.”

The bus broke down there, but the driver was able to fix it, and the group continued without serious incident. On the drive home they learned that after the march and rally a white Michigan woman was killed by Klan members while giving a 19-year-old local black activist a ride in her car.

In Montgomery, the supporters massed with the marchers who began in Selma and King, Rosa Parks and other leaders of the civil rights movement led them to the capitol.

Trevor said it felt like they were in a giant cathedral when they walked under trees arching over the streets, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

“Most of the marchers were white, but in front of us was a black father and son who carried our bags for us,” she said

Yes, she saw King, and yes, he was charismatic.

“King was an incredible leader” Trevor said. “He was very inspirational. His talk was the same kind of thoughts he always delivered. The admonition and urgency was to support passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. You know all the ways they kept black people from voting. I was impressed. In some ways awed because of that gathering of so many people.”

Three years later, King was assassinated in Memphis.

“We were sitting around the dinner table, my husband and children, and we heard the news,” Trevor said. “I remember I went into the bathroom. I felt so bad. I remember opening up the closet and burying my head in the towels I was so upset.”

Trevor later was involved with the local Office of Economic Opportunity, and that led to 30 years of being the volunteer distributor of emergency funds from the city and the Salvation Army to Rolling Meadows residents. She organized the first march for the hungry—20 miles through the suburbs that she said raised close to $750,000.

She also started the women’s program at Harper College, directing it for 17 years until her retirement in the early 1990s.

Cathy Duoba, her friend and president of the League of Women Voters chapter, likes to talk about people coming to Harper from all over the country to learn about establishing their own women’s programs. She also has a story that demonstrates how Trevor fought for open housing in the suburbs.

Duoba credits Trevor for pushing a historic lawsuit against Arlington Heights in the 1970s over the village’s denial of low-income apartments on land owned by the Victorian religious order. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and eventually ended with a compromise that led to the construction of low-income housing in a different neighborhood.

Trevor was key in persuading the project’s developers not to give up after being rejected by the village, Duoba said.

“She was an Italian mother. She laid so much guilt around that table,” she said. Trevor sees education as today’s top civil rights issue.

“We’ve got to work so that education is available to everybody, no matter what their financial status,” she said. “You have to be educated in order for a democracy to work.”

Arlington Heights King Day event

What: Video and question-and-answer session with Rena Trevor to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

When: 7:30 p.m., Monday, Jan. 17

Where: Arlington Heights Historical Museum, 110 W. Fremont St., Arlington Heights.

Sponsor: League of Women Voters of the Arlington Heights-Mount Prospect-Buffalo Grove Area.