By John Howell Sr.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage exited Batesville’s Mt. Zion M. B. Church Tuesday morning, March 19, 1968, he had almost climbed back into the station wagon that was transporting them when someone called him back.

There was a group of students from the nearby school who had come, an aide told the renowned civil rights leader. Would he stop for a moment and speak to them?
That moment was captured by a photographer accompanying King and his aides.

“Where are you all coming from?” he asked as his extended right hand was eagerly clutched by the hands of at least three young women at the same time. Visible in the photo’s background is the roofline of Mt. Zion Church.

Anna Jones (Henderson) of Batesville was one of the five Patton Lane High School seniors whose image was captured in the photo with King.

“It was a moment in history, and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” she said.

She and her identical twin sister, Annie Jones (Ray) — the Jones twins — had learned about King’s visit from their mother, Ruby Lee Jones. They lived with their parents on a farm near Crowder and traveled 18 miles to Patton Lane High School each day, where they were seniors.

When the bus let them off, they found the whole school buzzing with excitement about King’s visit to Batesville. She and her sister, joined by another senior, Christine Coleman (Dixon), decided to ask Patton Lane Principal Robert Hyde if they could go to the nearby Mt. Zion church to hear the King speak.

Somewhat to their surprise, Henderson recalls, Hyde said that the entire senior class could go if they could find a sponsor to accompany them.

Science teacher Percy Bruce, himself a veteran of Panola County voter registration struggles, readily agreed. Bruce said the he also remembers King’s Batesville visit and walking with the seniors to the church building located on Hoskins Road, just off Panola Avenue.

“Mr. Bruce walked us over there,” she said. “We were so excited. Some of the 11th graders slipped out and went,” Henderson added.

Following their graduation from Patton Lane in May, the twins graduated from Rust College, pursued advanced degrees and careers, but that day in Batesville remains a seminal moment in their lives.

“He really motivated me,” Henderson said.

King left Batesville and spent the next day and a half barnstorming through Mississippi, speaking to eager crowds about the Poor People’s Campaign he was organizing.

From Batesville he went to Marks, then Clarksdale, Greenwood, Grenada, Laurel and finally, at five minutes after midnight Wednesday morning, to Hattiesburg.

Later on Wednesday he came back through Jackson where an aide did most of the talking, according to the text of King’s speech there, because King had lost his voice.

The winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace then returned to Memphis.

On Thursday and Friday that week, a freak March snowstorm would blanket Panola County with six to 10 inches of snow.

Two weeks later, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis by a sniper’s bullet. He was 39.