If someone would have told Orren Dale 50 years ago that an African American could today become a sheriff, he wouldn’t have believed you. And what about a president? Completely out of the question.

Dale, an associate professor with the School of Social Work, has spent numerous summers in Greenville, Miss., with a group called the Delta Ministry. 

He has marched in parades to get voter registration rights for blacks. 

He stayed with African-American families, hiding in the shadows to avoid being beat or killed by white hate groups. 

He tried to give blacks more job opportunities without constantly being threatened by Southern racists, like how it was at the Greenville carpet mill.

But here’s the catch: Dale’s white.

“I’ve never been beat up,” he said, “just got my feelings hurt.

“We were nigger-lovers, faggots, communists. They told us ‘go back to where you came from.’”

Dale grew up in Liberal, Kan., a town out west that many joke should change its name to Conservative, Kan. It was when Dale saw a certain Rabbi speak about Germans and Jews that he was “shamed” into doing something about civil rights.

“I could probably give you most of that sermon word for word,” Dale said.

Trips to Greensville started when Dale was a junior at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan. It was the summer of 1964, “Freedom Summer,” as Dale remembers it. A group of about 20 or 30 college students, of mixed races, traveled by bus to Mississippi with the Delta Ministry to improve job opportunities and protest for voter registration rights.

To the southerners they were retaliating against, the group was an “outside agitator.” 

Although Dale believes his efforts were small in the scheme of things, shortly after his visits, voting rights were granted to all racial minorities in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But in Dale’s eyes, the fight isn’t over yet.

Although the Jim Crow laws are long gone, Dale said, the Civil Rights Movement was only “partly successful.”

“Jails,” he said, “that’s where black men have gone. We imprison everybody these days.”

And for those that ever said it was none of Dale’s business because of the color of his skin, his reply was always “bullshit.”

“All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” Dale said to quote Edmond Burke, a political leader in Great Britain that was in support of the American Revolution. “It’s everybody’s fight.”