Dallasteen Yates’ connection to Martin Luther King Jr. began when she was in the third grade in the spring of 1968.
Rev. Dr. Dallasteen Yates PHOTO BY NICK SAMUEL
Yates said her teacher rolled a TV in the classroom at Clemans Elementary School – now Dodgertown Elementary School – and had students watch news coverage in the days following King’s assassination.
“(My teacher) wept. Her eyes were red all day. She tried to keep the kids busy with coloring,” said Dr. Yates, a retired minister who was born and raised in Gifford and who is the daughter of Dallas Yates, the first Black deputy in Indian River County, and Jane Yates, a public-school teacher in the county. “It had a very direct impact as a child when he was assassinated.”
Yates attended Clemans Elementary during a time when schools in Indian River County were only partially integrated. Yates said the student body integrated two years later, with buses taking Black children to schools in white neighborhoods in Vero Beach, and white students bused to Gifford to attend school.
Nearly 60 years later, Yates took the stage as the guest speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Scholarship Banquet. The event was held last Saturday at the Gifford Youth Achievement Center. Yates spoke on King’s message of showing love even as Black people and their allies advocated for racial equality during the height of the Civil Rights struggle.
“Love your enemies. That specifically appears in a vast majority of (King’s) sermons, his works and speeches,” said Yates, who as an 11-year-old girl became a pianist at New Bethel A.M.E. Church in Gifford. “Whenever he talked with the group…that was so ingrained in their psyche that they could go forth and march, and that’s why we’re here today.”
Yates spoke and embodied King whom she referred to as “one of the greatest men in American and world history that ever lived.” Yates called King a 20th century prophet and a social change agent.
Larry Staley, president of the MLK Birthday Committee of Indian River County, said the group chose Yates as the guest speaker because she can retell history on how King’s influence helped mold her into the person she is today. The banquets also allow the committee to produce two scholarships each to the county’s four high schools. The event provides funds for students to continue their education.
“We have a good relationship between the MLK Birthday Committee, the county commission and administrator,” said Staley, who recently won the Philanthropist of the Year Award at the 19th Annual National Philanthropy Day Awards held in Vero Beach for his community work. “I give a lot of kudos to the county. They work very closely with us to make this happen.”
The spirited banquets bring in guest speakers each year to bring insight to residents about King and his legacy.
Larry Staley (left), president of the MLK Birthday Committee of Indian River County, with committee vice-president and retired Deputy Teddy Floyd. PHOTO BY NICK SAMUEL
King’s work in the Civil Rights Movement, along with his method of using nonviolence to protest injustice, influenced Yates to attend law school at Florida State University and later become a minister. Yates, who also worked to provide affordable housing to residents local and statewide, said fighting for equity was a God-given mission.
“I really felt like it was destiny that God demanded the calling on my life, from the first childhood impact to the journey my life would take,” Yates said. “For God to call me from being a lawyer to ministry…that’s social justice all over it.”
Yates said she also studied the works of King extensively as part of her schooling at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.
“I studied an entire semester about Dr. King, his legacy, his writings and his sermons. We had pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement come into our class and talk about the strategies they used,” Yates said. “The marches were strategized. They didn’t just jump out into the street. They went through training. They rehearsed what their nonviolent reactions would be to violence, even down to the point of having people spit in their faces in the safety of their strategy sessions.”
Yates, who was a pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, said King’s pivotal “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is one of her favorite works by the Baptist minister. In the long letter, King addressed his fellow clergymen, who took concern over the disruptive arrests of King and several hundred of his followers after they took a nonviolent approach to protest an injunction banning anti-segregation demonstrations.
“Some (clergy) were Black who were afraid, others were white who kept telling him ‘not now,’” Yates said.
King wrote that an unjust law is a “code that a power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.” King then went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But, such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”
Some of Yates’ other favorite writings by King include the books “Why We Can’t Wait” and “Where Do We Go From Here – Chaos or Community?”
Scholarship recipient Alexis Fay Solomon delivers a speech at the MLK Annual Scholarship Banquet on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025 at the Gifford Youth Achievement Center. PHOTO BY NICK SAMUEL
Yates is a 1981 graduate of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. She received her Juris doctorate from Florida State University College of Law in 1986 in Tallahassee and a master of divinity degree from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 2003 in Atlanta. She also earned a doctor of ministry degree from Payne Theological Seminary in 2019 in Ohio.
But time has not eased the pain or the struggle for equal rights, housing, health care and the pursuit of equity in the aftermath of King’s murder.
Yates is taken back to the memory of being in the classroom, listening to the news about King’s assassination in Memphis and the impact his death had around the globe. It’s a memory etched in Yates’ mind and that would catapult her to follow in the footsteps of the American civil rights leader.
“(The teacher) used that moment as a living history lesson while also allowing us to respond through coloring and drawing while it was being reported in real time on the news,” Yates said. “I am glad that I could witness that significant and pivotal moment in history while we had the love and care of our teacher sheltering and protecting us – even through her own tears.”
Photos by Joshua Kodis
