Several hundred copies of King’s prepared remarks had been distributed to reporters. When King went to the podium, shortly after 4 p.m., only a dozen or so volunteers stood between him and Raveling. As temperatures hovered near 90°, Raveling noticed that many of the marchers were dipping their feet into the reflecting pool to keep cool. Shortly after noon the crowd walked the nine tenths of a mile to the Lincoln Memorial. The program of speakers and entertainers began at the Washington Monument. Only about 25,000 people were on the Mall at the start of the day, but over the next hours the crowd swelled to nearly 250,000. They were delighted to learn they’d be stationed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Raveling and Wilson arrived at the Mall at 8 a.m. The school had done so much for Raveling. In ’62, Villanova’s new coach, Jack Kraft, asked him to come on board as a part-time assistant. He took a job as a marketing analyst with Sun Oil but remained an active supporter of the Wildcats’ program, often meeting with black recruits to share his positive experiences. When Raveling graduated in 1960, he assumed his basketball life was over. Villanova coach Al Severance arranged for the players to stay in a dormitory at Winston-Salem State, a historically black college. Once, during a trip to Wake Forest, the team got into a heated argument with a hotel elevator operator in Winston-Salem, N.C., who declared that the black players could not stay there. He was only the second black basketball player at the university, but he didn’t experience much racial conflict. In three years on the varsity he pulled down 835 rebounds, 11th on Villanova’s alltime list. Meanwhile, the 6' 4", 210-pound Raveling was flourishing on the basketball court. “He carried himself as you would envision a leader would do.” “I never heard anybody who had the command and gifts of public speaking that he did,” Raveling says of King. Raveling followed the events closely, and the civil rights movement was a frequent topic of conversation among his friends. The protest was ignited when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, and it ended with a court-mandated city ordinance desegregating Montomgery’s buses. “I’ve often joked that it wasn’t until I got to Villanova that I learned I grew up in the ghetto,” he says.īy the time Raveling enrolled in college in the fall of 1956, he knew all about Martin Luther King Jr., who had risen to national prominence by leading a 381-day bus boycott in Montgomery. He was a young black man living in segregated America, but for him racial injustice was largely an abstraction, something he read about in sociology class. Despite the family hardship he had endured, Raveling was living a blessed, sheltered life.