Melvin Watt: “Because on the Martin Luther King holiday, we had a wonderful tribute in Charlotte in which I read part of Lincoln's…”

“Because on the Martin Luther King holiday, we had a wonderful tribute in Charlotte in which I read part of Lincoln's words to the backdrop of our Charlotte symphony orchestra; and during the reading, they were showing on a television screen kind of excerpts from the sit-ins, and later that night as I was taking my mother home, she said, You know, I saw your brother in those clips that they were showing. I said, You saw my brother? What do you mean you saw my brother? It turned out that my oldest brother, who was about the same age as Franklin McCain, was a student at Johnson C. Smith University and participated in the original sit-ins in Charlotte, and he was right in the front of the sit-in clippings that were shown on that evening. I certainly never thought of my brother as a hero of sorts. But it is amazing the heroic steps that people like my colleague and Franklin McCain and even my brother took in those trying times. And we of the younger generation that have a little bit more hair than the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) thank him so much for everything that he did.”