Forty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., the University community along with several distinguished guests celebrated the civil rights leader’s life and legacy.
In a keynote address on Tuesday, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the noted a cappella group “Sweet Honey in the Rock” and Curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, urged young people to apply their energy towards the issues of their time rather than continuing to fight the battles of the 1960s.
Reagon began her address at the Memorial Chapel with a song, eliciting wild cheers from the audience. She plunged into her speech, reminding students that young people played a critical role in the Civil Rights Movement.
“In 1959, no church in Greensboro [N.C.] would let Dr. King speak, despite his being an ordained minister,” she said.
Instead, she noted, King spoke at a nearby school where four college freshmen who later initiated the famous sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter listened attentively.
Reagon said that the sit-in initiators weren’t much older than the average University student, part of her overall theme urging young people to seek out injustice in our society today and to act to correct it. These young people had disagreed with Jim Crow and took matters into their own hands by spawning a wider movement, so that “before the end of the week [students at] every college in the Greensboro area had sat in at every segregated space they could find,” she explained.
In an interview with The Argus at the reception following her address, Reagon urged students to seek out the injustices of today, rather than statically dwelling on history.
“Don’t wish you were back in the ’60s,” she said.
Andrea DePetris ’10, who also spoke during the event, echoed Reagon’s exhortation to students to look to current wrongs.
“Let us not think of ourselves as victims of the past but as agents of the present,” DePetris said. “Class, color, race, gender, privilege [all demand society’s attention].”
President Michael Roth called attention to King’s refusal to be cowed by the seeming hopelessness of his situation.
“How glorious that Dr. King never succumbed to [the] wilderness of the spirit, that he never let [the difficulty of the struggle] affect him,” he said. “How beautiful that faith is, and how inspirational.”
Students were in agreement that the day’s events were successful.
“Having someone like Dr. Reagon come is a big deal,” said Ruby-Beth Buitekant ’09. “She’s just phenomenal. She commands a lot of really positive respect, energy. Seeing her as an elder [in the Civil Rights Movement] and seeing her bridge the generational gaps is awesome.”
Sarah Brown ’10 agreed.
“I think it’s very important that Wesleyan has an MLK day celebration and the fact that they put [this level] of time, money, and effort in it is incredible,” she said.
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