An estimated 7,000 people packed Suffolk’s Peanut Park on June 28, 1963, to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful message of equality, exactly two months before he delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

According to stories in the Suffolk News-Herald at the time, leaders in the black community beforehand had assured city leaders there would be no protests or demonstrations — and there weren’t.

Escorting the civil rights icon during his visit to Suffolk were Nathaniel Walker, John Riddick and Ollie Taylor Jr. They were Nansemond County Sheriff’s Department’s first three black deputies, according to Taylor’s son, Ollie Taylor III.

Ollie Taylor Jr., 80, died on June 9 in Newport News. According to the younger Taylor, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer 38 years ago and fought it off, but two months ago it returned to claim his life.

“My dad didn’t really know King, and he was never really, really into the civil rights campaign. He knew about it,” Taylor, a resident of Augusta, Ga., recalled by phone on Tuesday.

“But him being one of the first black deputies in (Nansemond County) … he decided that he would make sure everyone in Suffolk would be treated like they were supposed to be.”

Taylor said that when his father discovered the national president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would be stopping off in Suffolk for a rally, given his position in the community, “he felt he needed to step up to the plate and protect Dr. King.”

“My dad was the type of person where he felt like everybody deserved to be treated equally,” he said.

Planters Peanuts let its workers off for King’s historic visit, and radio station WLPM broadcast his speech.

In the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, a News-Herald reporter observed, “With a flow of precisely-used words and sharply-honed phrases, Dr. Martin Luther King relentlessly pursued his theme that the Negro is still a slave a hundred years after he was set free.”

King was quoted: “There are some who say you cannot change people by laws, but if civil rights legislation can’t change the heart, it can control the heartless.”

The younger Taylor, now 57, left Suffolk to join the military in 1976. It was a long time ago when his father was trailblazing for the many black law enforcement officers that have come after him in the former county and in Suffolk, but Taylor has strong memories.

“I remember when dad was on night patrol and some people tried to rob a store off Main Street,” he said. “My dad showed up and had a little shootout with them. These people made off, and my dad had to go into the hospital.”

Taylor was only about 5 when King visited, but he has strong memories of that too. He recalls his mother and father telling the next-door neighbor to look after the kids, because they were heading over to Peanut Park.

One of his sisters, Brenda Wray, 62, of Temple Hills, Md., recalled the day a little differently. She said she and her sister, Portsmouth’s Vanessa Taylor, 59, accompanied their parents to the rally, adding the neighbor her brother mentioned was probably their grandmother.

“I can still hear his voice,” Wray said of King’s speech.

Taylor believes segregation in Suffolk finally started to moderate after King’s visit.

“We weren’t able to come uptown and live … we was pushed to live in our area where we grew up in,” he said. “But when Martin Luther King came here, doors started to open, because other people of other colors started to realize, ‘Hey, all of us were created equal.’

“Suffolk has come so far — to where you can live anywhere you want to live. But that was only because of my dad” and others who demanded civil rights.

Wray said people at the rally “felt a sense of hope and a sense of change, and I could also feel the anger.”

Suffolk was “a racist small town,” she said, adding, “I remember going into restaurants and you would have to go around the side where it said ‘colored only.’”

“Things needed to change,” Wray said. “They were very, very divided. For Dr. King to even want to come here, it said a lot. I feel that after he did come, things did to some degree begin to change.”

Taylor said his dad was “personable” but tough. “He loved his kids (but) he’d get out there on the forefront and (tell us) straight-up” what not to do.

According to his obituary, Ollie Taylor Jr. later in life worked as head of security at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, and was at the Newport News shipyard when he retired.

A celebration of his life is scheduled for noon Wednesday at Suffolk’s Oak Grove Baptist Church.