word to describe him, and chose messianic instead. Romney saw a moral dimension in every issue and his political views were held with as much fervor as religious ones; writer Theodore H. White said "the first quality that surfaced, as one met and talked with George Romney over a number of years, was a sincerity so profound that, in conversation, one was almost embarrassed." Romney supported the American Civil Rights Movement while governor. Although he belonged to a church that did not allow black people in its lay clergy, Romney's hardscrabble background and subsequent life experiences led him to support the movement. He reflected, "It was only after I got to Detroit that I got to know Negroes and began to be able to evaluate them and I began to recognize that some Negroes are better and more capable than lots of whites." During his first State of the State address in January 1963, Romney declared that "Michigan's most urgent human rights problem is racial discrimination—in housing, public accommodations, education, administration of justice, and employment." Romney helped create the state's first civil rights commission. When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Detroit in June 1963 and led the 120,000-strong Great March on Detroit, Romney designated the occasion Freedom March Day in Michigan, and sent state senator Stanley Thayer to march with King as his emissary, but did not attend himself because it was on Sunday. Romney did participate in a much smaller march protesting housing discrimination the following Saturday in Grosse Pointe, after King had left. Romney supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 then under consideration by Congress, and his support for it and advocacy of civil rights, in general, brought him criticism from some in his own church. In January 1964, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles member Delbert L. Stapley wrote him that a proposed civil rights bill was "vicious legislation" and told him that "the Lord had placed the curse upon the Negro" and men should not seek its removal. Romney refused to change his position and increased his efforts towards civil rights. Regarding the church policy itself, Romney was among those liberal Mormons who hoped the church leadership would revise the theological interpretation that underlay it, but Romney did not believe in publicly criticizing the church, subsequently saying that fellow Mormon Stewart Udall's 1967 published denunciation of the policy "cannot serve any useful religious purpose". In