In the chaos of barely past midnight, after police riddled a women's dormitory with bullets leaving two dead and 15 wounded, Young was seen by many to be a leader. In his book about Jackson State, To Survive and Thrive, former college president John A. Peoples describes Young as an eloquent savior that tumultuous night. Today, Peoples says he is tired of telling the story. But in his book, he expresses his gratitude to Young. When no one would listen to the college president, they listened to "Jughead." "People had told me over the years that they enjoyed hearing me sing, and I knew that it had a calming effect on people," he says. "It was a speech I had memorized verbatim. It was the speech that had inspired us for so many years." With a police bullhorn in hand, he began to recite the words of Martin Luther King Jr. A sophomore in 1970, Gene Young calmed fellow students with words from King's speech at the March on Washington. The verses are quoted here. (Christina Hange Kukuk) Gene Young was born in the health center of Jackson State at a time when black families were not allowed to use the white hospitals of their state's capital. After graduating from the college, he later completed graduate work in Connecticut. Now a compliance officer in the university's athletic department, Young says he'll probably die at Jackson State, too. Young grew up in the early '60s, when the Masonic Temple just down the street from the university headquartered the civil rights movement in Mississippi. As a 12-year-old in June 1963, he was one of hundreds of non-violent marchers herded onto flat-bed garbage trucks and carted to animal holding pens at the state fairgrounds in Jackson to await trial. The people had amassed on Lynch Street to protest the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. "We slept on concrete floors and ate food prepared in garbage cans," he says. "It was something like a small-scale concentration camp here in the 1960s." In August that year, Young was lucky enough to be one of thousands of black men and women to hear King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. "At 12, the civil rights movement was my Head Start program," he says. "I guess I was too young to be afraid then." At 17, Young was just beginning college at Jackson State as a speech and theater arts major.