Martinez / Relationship with Jerry LeVias
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Interviewer-"I like to hear more about your friendship with your [?] its a secondary source with some of the problems that he may have encountered at SMU. Jerry recently had a Fox Network premiere last year where he was given an award and it was an HBO special they had and I was there, Jerry invited me and Jerry and I also met Dr. King when he came to SMU in the mid-60s when we were there in 67, 66, right before his assisination and Jerry and I were in [?] auditorium and Jerry got to meet Dr. King personally, I was kind of standing behind. After the speech, we were kind of led into the auditorium because there was KKKs and jumpers protesting in front of me [?] auditorium, but Jerry tells a story on how he kept all the abuse, all the hatred, all the taunts to himself and based them on the conversation he had with Dr. King and Dr. King recognized and said, "Your'e going to be an incredible athlete, you are an incredible athlete [?] you're going to make an incredible celebrity, so you need to restrain from the emotion, from getting all these people get into your skin, and he did that and so, Jerry never shared a lot of those emotions with anyone except when he came back to Dallas after a game and Jerry and I would play basketball together and he shared the things, the taunts, people would spit on him, people would call him the N-word, and he shared those with me, and so I was kind of his outlet, and we also went out and partied together. Jerry liked to go to Bishop College and see the young ladies over there at Bishop cause there wasn't nothing much that Jerry could do on campus and I would take him to Mexican American dances, so Jerry and I bonded and our experiences were one of those that we found some commonality and what we were, there was only three Mexican Americans [?] and Jerry was the only African American [?] later there was two others, so
| Interview | Interview with Rene Martinez |
| Subjects | Race Relations › Black-White Race Relations |
| White Resistance to Civil Rights › Extrajudicial Violence › Ku Klux Klan (KKK) | |
| White Resistance to Civil Rights › White Resistance and Tokenism | |
| People › King, Martin Luther, Jr. | |
| Race Relations › Racial Slurs | |
| Tags | Levias, Jerry |
| Southern Methodist University (SMU) | |
| John Birch Society | |
| Bishop College | |
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| Interview date | 2011-09-07 |
| Interview source | Documenting the History of the Civil Rights Movement in Dallas County |
| Interviewees | Martinez, Rene |
| Interviewers | Dulaney, W. Marvin |
| Thomas, Alfred | |
| Locations | Dallas, TX |
| Duration | 00:03:03 |
| Citation | "Relationship with Jerry LeVias," from Rene Martinez oral history interview with W. Marvin Dulaney and Alfred Thomas, September 07, 2011, Dallas, TX, Civil Rights in Black and Brown Interview Database, https://crbb.tcu.edu/clips/6086/relationship-with-jerry-levias, accessed December 24, 2025 |