Growing up at his mother’s feet in the Mother Emanuel AME community, Arthur learned to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” (Micah 6: 8). 

In 1963, he was arrested in the Charleston Movement sit-ins and attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1964, he desegregated the previously all-white Bishop England High School with eight other Black students. In 1965, he was the only Black player in South Carolina’s all-white high school basketball league. 

These were just some of the things he carried — some of the spirits who walked beside him — when Arthur came to Notre Dame. Like so many young Black activists who came of age in the freedom struggles, he was galvanized by Martin Luther King’s assassination and inspired by defiance of the Black Power movement. 

By 1969, Arthur was the inaugural president of the Afro-American Society. He declared: “Racism must die, and that means the destruction of the racist. We are engaged in a battle to save lives.”