The Temple University theater professor, actor and civil-rights worker was on a personal pilgrimage to visit significant sites in the civil-rights movement.

Dumas, who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was back in the infamous town in which three colleagues in the movement had been murdered in June 1964.

Barely able to breathe, Dumas, 62, told his wife, Josephine Ann, "I can't stay here." Memories of Dumas' frantic search for the dead men stirred like malevolent ghosts. "I felt like a Jewish person must feel visiting Auschwitz," Dumas said.

But he and his wife stayed the night anyway. People in town treated them well. And when they left the next day, they knew firsthand that much had changed.

Change. Change was what they had all wanted, what King fought for, what firebrand foot soldiers like Dumas dedicated their lives to.

Today, to commemorate King Day at Temple, Dumas will talk about the change from roiling night to clearer day that African Americans have seen, thanks to King. And, he will somberly add, there's much work to be done.

"I am a survivor of the civil-rights movement," Dumas said, dark eyes shining and intense. "My job is to make young people understand where they come from, the noble history of the struggle for human rights.

"And kids on the street in North Philly who think they've got nothing but dope must know they come from Martin Luther King and the thousands who transformed America into a more human place."

For many years, this country treated blacks as less than human, and Dumas bore a share of the ignominy of institutionalized racism.

Born in Albany, Ga., Dumas moved to Chicago with his family when he was an infant. "It was the 1950s, but it wasn't Grease. It was the unhappy time of American apartheid."

Transferred from a black school to a predominantly white one when he was 10, Dumas remembers being hauled to the front of the class by a teacher who then announced, "Class, this is the reason our standards at this school are being lowered." It was devastating.

"The school had been polluted by me, is what she was saying," Dumas said. "Someone in authority is saying there's something wrong with you. It made me feel small. And at that age, you don't have the armor or ego to pass it off as her racism."

Soon enough, he was stirred by King. And a teenage Dumas began to help organize train trips for Chicagoans to the March on Washington in 1963.

"It was idealism," Dumas said. "We thought we could make a difference and, frankly, we did."

On Aug. 28, 1963, Dumas cooled his feet in the Reflecting Pool on the Mall in Washington while listening to King's "I Have a Dream" speech. "It was a miracle that 250,000 of us came together," he said.

Dumas went south and worked with King and his followers. Part of the throng that accompanied King, Dumas marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala., soon after the March 7, 1965, Bloody Sunday siege, in which blacks demonstrating for voting rights were attacked by Alabama police.

"We looked for snipers," Dumas remembered, "and we sang a song of freedom as we marched: 'We Shall Not Be Moved.' "

In 1967, King visited Miami for a conference on poverty, and the young, angry Dumas spoke forcefully with "Doc," as King's acolytes called him.

"I was angry that the conference was not taking place in the black neighborhood," Dumas recalled, smiling. "I was young and stupid and raising a firestorm, and Doc was very patient with me."

King explained to Dumas that no hotel in the black section of town was large enough to accommodate the conference. Then he asked Dumas questions about the white students who had gone to Mississippi to join the movement.

"He made a joke about how we all had to protect the white kids," Dumas said. "He had a wonderful sense of humor."

After King's assassination, Dumas got a law degree from Yale University, then went to work for the United Nations Center for Transnational Corporations, spending part of the time in South Africa. There he helped develop a code of conduct for multinational companies.

Not long after, while at Pennsylvania State University on a Fulbright scholarship, Dumas traveled to South Africa again as an activist, playwright and teacher.

"I was working to use theater as a means for social change," he said. He collected stories of AIDS that children told him, then wrote plays in which they acted.

Indulging a growing love of acting, Dumas later took a series of small parts in movies, including Deep Impact, Die Hard With a Vengeance, The Peacemaker, and Cop Land.

At 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Dumas has a larger-than-life presence, which explains why, in his acting career, he is often cast as a judge or other authority figure in shows such as Law and Order and movies such as Jumpin' Jack Flash.

These days at Temple, Dumas is combining his theater and activist backgrounds.

He's recording stories of young people in North Philadelphia with the goal of turning them into plays.

And he's directing a production of The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by Rita Dove, former U.S. poet laureate.

The play is, among other things, about the lines between blacks and whites that King sought to blur.

Over the Temple Christmas break, Dumas was seized by the notion to revisit the Road to Freedom, as he calls it, the geography of civil rights in America.

After spending the holiday in Chicago with a mentor, Dumas and Josephine went to Little Rock, Ark., where Central High School was desegregated 50 years ago.

Then it was on to Austin, Texas, to see the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library. "John F. Kennedy was a great talker, but LBJ got more civil-rights legislation into law than any other politician," Dumas said.

From Austin, Dumas went to check on the plight of black people in New Orleans, where he'd volunteered to clean up the besieged Lower Ninth Ward after the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.

After that, it was the tough night in Philadelphia, Miss., then on to Selma to revisit the Bloody Sunday experience.

For Dumas, the trip was an opportunity for reflection on the success of the civil-rights movement. And a realization that there is much work ahead.

"There are still so many places where black folks are kept from pursuing their dreams," Dumas said. "White folks see Oprah and Tiger Woods and think black people have arrived. But I live in North Philly. And I don't see Oprah there."

Dumas is respected by actors and activists alike. "He always pushed you to excel," said Nora Berger-Green, a former acting student of his. "He's a passionate man."

Outside the theater, said African American historian and author Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Dumas is still active "helping the less fortunate gain access to the system. He embodies the ideal of Martin Luther King by lifting people up along with him. He's very committed to both civil and human rights. And not just on King's day. Every day."

When Dumas speaks at Temple today, he will, like the teacher he is, stress the lessons of King. "I will be making myself an old bore with young people, talking about the civil-rights movement and the struggle we had to finally be treated as humans."