Darius Gray was one of only two black American students at Brigham Young University at the height of the civil-rights movement in 1965.
His fellow Mormon students encouraged Gray, a freshman at the LDS Church-owned school in Provo, to go to the Wilkinson Center to see what he thought was a film celebrating the movement’s advances. Instead, the eager underclassman discovered the movie was actually called “Civil Riots USA: The Watts Story,” a John Birch Society propaganda film that attacked the movement as part of a communist plot.
On Monday, Gray will return to the same BYU building as the keynote speaker for the school’s commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.