On January 11, 1968, at Taft Memorial Gymnasium on this site, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the community of Ohio Northern University. Ohio Northern University was one of the last campuses this preeminent American civil rights leader visited before his assassination four months later, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. In his speech there, he declared, "I believe that we can emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice."