Though offered entirely online and remotely through Zoom sessions, the college’s 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. Day program still delivered its share of insight, criticism, and hope.

Here are a few quotes that capture important messages from the day.

“I’ll never forget the shock I felt when Chris Wallace from Fox News asked, at the first presidential debate, ‘What does re-imagining policing look like?’ It marks an important moment that would have been inconceivable even last year: The rhetoric of Black Lives Matter protesters have made their way into the vocabulary of a Fox News journalist on a national debate stage.”

— Megan Ming Francis

Francis, a scholar at the University of Washington, offered this quote during a session on the value of social science research to racial justice. A political scientist, Francis researches American politics, looking at the intersection of racial violence and the Black freedom movement. 

The shift in the national conversation, along with the rapid change in public opinion during 2020, toward broad support of Black Lives Matter, seems “surreal,” says Francis. “Let’s remember that in 2014, many white Americans thought it acceptable to debate the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.’” 

“Truth inherently has value. In order to have shared understandings, we have to have some level of devotion to critically interrogate our own history and come to a set of truths that is reasonably representative.”

— Dylan Gyauch-Lewis ’21 of Nashville, Tenn.

Gyauch-Lewis’ quote is from the annual Rev. Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Class of 1920, Debate.

Featuring students from Morehouse College and �ֲ���ý, the informal debate (no winners were declared) saw the students tackle the question of whether the House should “regret the portrayal of the Union in the Civil War as a morally righteous actor.”

No regret was needed, said the Opposition: Regardless of the Union’s righteousness, it’s important to portray the Union in a kind of myth-making way to advance shared ideals and lessons about what it means to be an American. Gyauch-Lewis countered by saying that the pursuit of truth is more important than myth-making.

Supporting the motion were Daniel Edwards of Morehouse and Gyauch-Lewis ’21 of �ֲ���ý. Samuel Melcher ’21 of New York City and Caleb Strickland of Morehouse College took the Opposition.

“I wasn’t a bit surprised. I truly had hoped that things had changed. And what I learned from the movie was that things haven’t changed that much.”

— Pamela Baker ’69, Helen A. Papaioanou Professor Emerita of Biological Sciences

Baker offered this quote after a screening of the 2020 documentary Picture a Scientist, which depicts patterns of sexual harassment and discrimination as experienced by three generations of women scientists: a biologist, a chemist and a geologist.

The post-film discussion was multigenerational, including Baker other senior �ֲ���ý STEM faculty, plus three guests: a biochemist, cancer biologist, and a graduate student in astrophysics. 

“I do feel more hopeful after I heard the three young women scientists on our panel,” said Baker. “They still face challenges, but now they can talk about it. In the ‘old days’ we knew we’d better just keep our mouths shut because that’s just the way life was.”

Baker reflected on her own experiences, including as a technician in a laboratory at the University of South Carolina Medical School. There she was harassed by her boss at the lab, who invited her to “dinner and dancing and whatever” whenever her husband, David Baker ’70, then in the Navy, was deployed. 

“I was supposed to feel grateful,” she assumed, since the man had given her responsibility in her job, but “it was always very uncomfortable.” As she went on to her own doctoral work, the discrimination and slights she faced included having a male colleague repeatedly leave her name left off papers she had co-authored, until she asked. “It was good that he said yes, but a little weird that I had to ask.” 

“Things have changed somewhat. They haven’t changed enough. And just like what we’re seeing with race and white supremacy in this country, there are a lot of things that were underground, that were societal norms that you didn’t do as explicitly, that have been blown open. And you actually see it being much more open now in a lot of places.”

— Bonnie Shulman, Professor Emerita of Mathematics

During the panel, Schulman shared her own painful experiences with sexual harassment, including by a mathematician who preyed on her at a conference when she was young and just starting out in her academic career in mathematics.

“Knowing that there were people being self-critical was satisfying. Honesty gets prospective students engaged.”

— Ryan Fisse ’22 of Los Altos, Calif.

Attending a session that discusses how a predominantly white college like �ֲ���ý markets the college to prospective students, including BIPOC students, Fisse talked about being attracted to �ֲ���ý because of its “founded by abolitionists” marketing. 

As a student, he attended a Mount David Summit presentation led by Professor of History Joe Hall and students. There, he learned more about �ֲ���ý’ early history, including that funding came from money Benjamin �ֲ���ý made from his mills, which prior to the Civil War used cotton grown by enslaved persons. He said he valued the fact that �ֲ���ý people were trying to tell a more complex story.

“Making this origin story that’s sort of mythified central to our marketing is disingenuous. It presents our diversity work as done. We know that’s wrong. Prospective students know that’s wrong.”

— Maddie Sirois ’21 of Maplewood, N.J.

In the same session, Sirois, who is an Admission tour guide, says that emphasizing the college’s laudatory origin story in marketing materials has overshadowed, and can hinder, important, ongoing antiracism work at �ֲ���ý, implying the work is done. 

“The data urges us to rethink the ‘mantra’ that Maine is a white state. Maine is not so white. It is not when it comes to the contribution of communities of color to Maine’s economy and culture. It is certainly not when it comes to COVID-19.”

— Professor Emerita of Politics Leslie Hill

Maine has the in the nation: BIPOC people make up around 2 percent of the state’s population, yet have represented almost a quarter of coronavirus cases.

The MLK Day session “Racial Disparity, Structural Violence and COVID-19 in Maine” looked at the resilience, innovation, and resource-pooling that BIPOC communities in Maine are displaying in the difficult battle again the pandemic.

The program was organized by the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

“Brigade, because we’re warriors carrying out a mission of getting direct access and control of resources and bringing them to our community.”

— Crystal Cron, a community health worker and health justice activist

Cron is president of Presente! Maine, an organization that assesses and responds to the needs of immigrant communities, particularly the Latinx community, which represents a majority of the seafood processing and agricultural workforce in Maine.

Her quote refers to the action last spring, as grocery store shelves emptied, of creating a food brigade to serve her community. It began with just rice and beans and grew to a distribution of more than 15,000 pounds of fresh food weekly, and to helping the community grow 25,000 pounds of its own food. 

“It’s empowering and exhausting and infuriating at once,” said Cron. “We’re taking our survival into our own hands. But then, why must we do this when there’s practically endless resources that can be used to make sure our needs are met?”

“I think �ֲ���ý has a habit of being the first to speak about anti-Blackness when it happens in the nation, but they refuse to address the trauma that they have caused students. And the form of trauma you’re putting us through is anti-Blackness. And the fact that �ֲ���ý was built off of anti-blackness: Where do you think the money came from? That came from Black pain and Black trauma. And the exploitation of Black bodies. And if �ֲ���ý doesn’t acknowledge this, and that we’re still exploited, as students of color and athletes, then how can �ֲ���ý address their anti-Blackness?”

— Sam Jean-Francois ’23 of Everett, Mass.

Jean-Francois spoke during the annual Sankofa event. Typically featuring performance, this year’s session was a 75-minute conversation centered on Blackness in America, particularly in the aftermath of the insurrection. 

Jean-Francois and others spoke to the personal and shared struggles Black students experience at �ֲ���ý. The distinction between the virtuous origin story so often told, of abolitionists founding the college, and the more recently examined, more authentic one, connecting the money from mill owners like Benjamin �ֲ���ý directly to the labor of enslaved people, has been part of the broader conversation at �ֲ���ý in the last year. 

“You see videos of these terrorists saying, ‘You don’t treat us like this. You’re treating me like I’m Black Lives Matter.’ So to be Black, you’re already considered a terrorist. Your whole being is anti-establishment.”

— Areohn Harrison ’20 of Rockville, Md.

Harrison’s quote calls out the Capitol mob’s blatant hypocrisy, representing itself as a band of patriots, and noted the trauma of being Black in a country primed to presume the worst about you.

His quote also spoke to a broad consensus among the Sankofa group: the entitlement of a predominantly white, Trump-supporting mob as it attacked the Capitol, and how disgraceful (but unsurprising) it was to witness the dazed response of outnumbered and unprepared law enforcement. That lackluster response was in sharp contrast to the massive armed and armored forces regularly mustered for peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

“Yes, it’s great to celebrate MLK, and yes, the holiday is needed to bring to light the work of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and so many other folks. But also, we have to focus on the fact that the U.S. only celebrates him now that he no longer has breath in his body.”

— Akira Townes ’17 of Cockeysville, Md.

Townes was describing the frustration of the U.S. historically failing to acknowledge the value of BIPOC folks “until they’re no longer here.”

Townes, a graduate student in public health at the University of Washington, made the observation during a Q&A period in the workshop “Exploring the History and Meaning of MLK Day, ” a session that used a sociological lens to understand the importance of the holiday, the ritual and traditions involved, and controversies or conflicts surrounding the way the day is celebrated. 

Georgia Southern University sociologist Chad Posick joined �ֲ���ý sociologists Emily Kane, Benjamin Moodie, and Michael Rocque on the panel.

“If we’re going to compare it to a 100-meter race, I don’t know how many meters the movement has really taken us.”

— Jacob Iwowo ’23 of London

A panelist for a program led by students in the course “#BlackLivesMatter,” taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Cassandra Shepard, Iwowo responded to a question from �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer.

She asked, “What do you think of as the distinctive power of the way the Black Lives Matter movement is organized, perhaps as compared with the earlier era of the civil rights movement, and are you optimistic that this is a moment of breakthrough?”

Iwowo, who had shared information on economic inequality as the underlying driver of the Black Lives Matter movement, said while he didn’t want to be “Afro-pessimistic,” he questions the relative significance of the current movement within the historical context of centuries of oppression.

“Not to say that the work that has been done hasn’t been amazing, and that it isn’t great to see the support, but, our presentations today are specifically about the systematic issues that are at play. And some of those systematic yardsticks need to be moved in order to call Black Lives Matter a breakthrough, in my mind.”

Another panelist, Mohamed Diawara ’23 of Philadelphia, who had led a discussion on racial justice and the criminal justice system, jumped in first by focusing on the differences between the two movements, beginning with the concrete example of technology.

Media coverage of protests and violence against protesters was extensive in the 1960s, but “a lot of stuff had to go through newspapers, radio, or word of mouth,” he said. “Maybe it took longer to get around, or the severity of maybe wasn’t perceived how it should have been perceived at the time.”

Today, “someone can record what happens and you see it instantly.”

“What Black Lives Matter also provides that I think is maybe a little bit different is more gendered justice…. and making a visible space for LGBTQ folk to be able to be more at the forefront of the movement.”

“I would deem that the Black Lives Matter movement is an awakening for a lot of young people. It’s a call to action for young and old; it seems to be bridging generations.”

— Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Cassandra Shepard

Shepard offered a third answer to Spencer’s question, delving into another dimension of difference between the two movements, including “maybe a little bit different is more gendered justice…. and making a visible space for LGBTQ folk to be able to be more at the forefront of the movement.”

As a historian, Barbara Ransby searches the past for remedies for today’s and tomorrow’s societal problems. To cope with the perilous times we live in, she recommends that we look to the concept of intersectionality, the legacy of civil rights leader Ella Baker, and the present example of the Movement for Black Lives.

Ransby, scheduled to give the 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote address, came to campus a few months later than expected due to untimely winter weather. Her speech was closely aligned with this year’s MLK Day theme, “Lifting Every Voice: Intersectionality and Activism,” extending the relevance of the holiday beyond a single date.

Ransby, a Distinguished Professor of African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is no stranger to activism.

Barbara Ransby joins members of the MLK Day Committee and guests for a dinner at the President’s House hosted by Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Introduced as a “scholar-activist” by Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics, Ransby has both studied and participated in countless areas of activism and social justice, from publishing a book on Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement to co-writing the famous New York Times ad “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” which protested the U.S. Senate’s treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991.

Ransby’s address looked at the need for this coupling of scholarship and activism. “I want to wrestle with the challenges of this moment and rely on the past to make sense of the present, to provoke us to reimagine a better collective future,” she said.

Associate Professor of Leslie Hill greets Barbara Ransby after introducing her in Memorial Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Some of those challenges include the rise of violent white nationalism in recent years, police violence in marginalized communities, and ever-widening economic disparities in the United States.

What exactly do today’s problems have to do with intersectionality, Ella Baker, and the Movement for Black Lives?

“I would argue, everything,” Ransby said.

Intersectionality

“Intersectionality has become a rockstar in our political lexicon,” Ransby said. It’s appeared in discourse from the #MeToo movement, Golden Globes speeches, newspaper op-eds, and there’s even a new Institute for Intersectional Studies at Columbia University.

The term was coined in the 1980s by law professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and it helps us understand that identities and institutions are not isolated, but interact with and mediate each other.

“Structures of power do not exist in silos, but reinforce and bolster each other in symbiotic relationships,” Ransby said.

Faculty, students, staff, and community members filled Memorial Commons to hear Ransby. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Intersectionality was integral to activism in this country long before Crenshaw came up with the term.

“When Sojourner Truth declared ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ in 1859, pointing out that she was a black mother and unfree worker, her words reflected an intersectional framework,” Ransby said.

Ransby cited the #MeToo movement as a good example of intersectionality, explaining how powerful women in Hollywood incorporated stories of abuse they heard from the National Alliance of Domestic Workers into their narrative.

“Rather than saying, ‘We are all experiencing the same thing as women,’ the #MeToo group appended the domestic workers’ statement to their own as an affirmation that we can be united without glossing over our differences,” Ransby said.

Ella Baker

Ella Baker “was intersectional before there was a term for it,” said Ransby, who studied the political organizer for 15 years.

Born in 1903, Baker spent most of her life fighting for the civil rights movement, as well as organizing for various human rights and labor groups.

Labeled by her colleagues as a “difficult woman,” Baker was not afraid to challenge people in her own circles. “She struggled inside the organizations that employed her, demanding more inclusion and democracy and accountability,” Ransby said.

Though an ally of Martin Luther King Jr., Baker criticized his leadership.

“Dr. King once said that leadership flows from the pulpit to the pew, and for Ella Baker it was precisely the opposite,” said Ransby.

Famously quoted as saying, “Strong people don’t need a strong leader,” Baker simply did not believe that a larger-than-life leader was imperative for social change.

As a behind-the-scenes organizer, Baker’s career life and work has many takeaways, including the importance of grassroots organizing, bringing the most marginalized communities to the center of activism, and supporting women in leadership.

“She did not see the movement from King’s mountaintop, but rather from the valleys and back alleys of the struggle for freedom,” said Ransby.

“Strong people don’t need a strong leader,” said Barbara Ransby, quoting civil rights and human rights activist Ella Baker. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Movement for Black Lives

Ransby pointed out that Black Lives Matter, an organization that arose from a 2013 Twitter hashtag, is only one of 50 or so organizations in the Movement for Black Lives coalition.

In addition to national and regional organizations such as BLM and Black Youth Project 100, there is an “entire ecosystem of local organizations that have sprung up in response to killing after killing of black people,” Ransby said.

These groups, in the spirit of Ella Baker, engage in behind-the-scenes work, using social media to engage and mobilize their bases in response to murders.

Calling these groups “political quilters,” Ransby explained that they do the unseen, yet vital work of tactical training for protests, tech support, and communications.

“We see spontaneous protests and think they come out of thin air, but in order to be sustained, people have to do skill-sharing and serious planning,” said Ransby.

À la Ella Baker, local Movement for Black Lives groups are mostly decentralized, eschewing traditional leadership for what BLM founder Patrisse Cullors describes as “not a leaderless, but leader-full movement.”

The Movement for Black Lives has also rejected the politics of respectability, which Ransby described as supporting middle-class imagery of hard-working, wholesome, church-going people.

“The Movement for Black Lives has really embraced poor and working-class black youth as being at the center of their political agenda,” she said. “It didn’t matter what Rekia Boyd said when she was shot. It didn’t matter why Walter Scott was running when he was shot in the back in South Carolina, didn’t matter what Tamir Rice was holding in Cleveland.”

Ransby participated in “White Supremacy in U.S. History,” a course taught by Assistant Professor of History Andrew Baker. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In summary, she explained that the movement seeks change not just for black people, but for everyone affected by today’s injustices. By using a bottom-up power structure of organizing and including intersectional practices in their mission, the movement is what Ransby calls “a visionary force for transformative change.”

“The Movement for Black Lives has connected to the past, affirmed an intersectional practice in the present, and has been a visionary force calling for certain kinds of transformative change,” she said.

In one single year in the United States, “102 unarmed black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police in this country,” Shaun King told a �ֲ���ý audience on Oct. 11.

The year was not during the violent depths of 20th-century Jim Crow racism, either. It was 2015.

And that number, 102, “is why they’re taking a knee,” said King, a journalist and justice activist.

King was referring, of course, to Colin Kaepernick and other athletes, including some at �ֲ���ý and its NESCAC peers, inspired by the San Francisco 49ers quarterback to kneel, in protest against racial injustice, during the national anthem at the start of games.

Senior social justice writer for the New York Daily News and a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, King spoke to a capacity audience in the Gomes Chapel, offering an overview, punctuated with penetrating detail, of the current fractured state of U.S. race relations.

A graduate of Morehouse College, King opened his talk with a few words about longtime Morehouse president and �ֲ���ý graduate Benjamin E. Mays, Class of 1920. “At Morehouse, literally, he is like a god on our campus,” King said.

King described Mays as “probably one of the two or three most important people” in the life of Morehouse graduate and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

Black Lives Matter activist and New York Daily News justice writer Shaun King speaks in Gomes Chapel on Oct. 11, 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

“When you think about the roots and the origins of the modern-day civil rights movement, you will always hear Dr. Mays’ voice, because he was the guy behind the scenes…that leaders were consistently going to” for guidance and validation.

“So �ֲ���ý is tied up in that. And that’s a powerful thing, and I hope all of you understand, it should be a point of pride that Dr. Mays not only attended here, but was embraced and loved here. And so I’m honored to be here,” he said.

Central to King’s address was the idea that — despite great thinkers’ erstwhile belief that human morality was always improving — the quality of human behavior has its downs as well as its ups. And right now, America is living on the downhill slope.

As King put it, “We’re in a dip.”

He got this concept during the fall of 2014 — “a really pivotal time in my life” — when he and many other Americans were reeling from the summer’s spate of police shootings, many of which were caught on video. At the same time, King was suffering through an eminently droppable graduate-school course in historiography.

A theme central to racial justice activist Shaun King’s talk at �ֲ���ý was that American society has lapsed into a “dip” in morality and behavior. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But that course introduced him to Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century scholar regarded as the father of modern historiography. Von Ranke discovered the variability in moral progress by creating a massive timeline of historic events and searching it for basic trends.

“Sometimes human beings are amazing, and sometimes they’re really terrible,” King said. “Sometimes the quality of humanity goes up, and sometimes it goes really far down.”

Moreover, it’s often hard to know where we are in the cycle: “When you wake up, brush your teeth, and get ready for class, you’re just thinking, ‘I want to be on time for class,'” King said. “You’re not thinking about the history of the moment.”

Supported by slides and video, King had plenty of evidence for the dip theory, from the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide to the rise of Donald Trump.

He pointed out that the June 2015 killings of nine African Americans by a white man during a Bible study session in a church in Charleston, S.C., was the deadliest U.S. hate crime against blacks in at least 85 years.

And that massacre “took place on our watch last year,” King said.

He noted that in 1902 the number of lynchings of blacks also reached 102. “It jars me that we have to go back over 100 years to find a single year when as many African Americans were lynched as were shot and killed by police” in 2015.

A rapt audience listens to racial justice activist Shaun King in the Gomes Chapel on Oct. 11, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I say that particularly — I say that with love — for the white folk in the room [who are] listening with love, who are having a hard time processing the anger, the frustration, the protests, having a hard time making sense of it,” said King.

“It’s disturbing. I’m not even saying that lynching and the killings by police are a one-to-one parallel, but they’re pretty close, and that we would have to go back to 1902 — it’s a problem.”

“This system was created to deliberately prosecute African Americans for low-level drug offenses and nonviolent offenses.”

Citing Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery by Another Name, King talked at length about the perversion of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was originally intended to abolish slavery unconditionally, but was rewritten to accommodate slave labor for convicts.

This gave rise to new laws that essentially criminalized being black in order to ensure a steady labor supply in the prisons. That strategy took a new twist during the 1970s and 1980s with drug laws that ensured different standards of criminal justice for blacks and whites — leading to U.S. incarceration rates that are as much as 1,000 percent higher than other developed nations’.

“That there are stores where you can buy marijuana legally, and then my friend Brandon is serving a 10-year prison sentence [for marijuana possession] is ridiculous,” King said. “He’s serving a 10-year sentence because this system was created to deliberately prosecute African Americans for low-level drug offenses and nonviolent offenses.”

With a Q&A to follow, King closed his formal address with a look at The Atlantic Monthly‘s decision to endorse Hillary Clinton for president — only the third such endorsement in the magazine’s 159-year history. The others were for Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.

“We have never found our way accidentally out of a dip in the quality of humanity.”

“I actually campaigned very heavily for Bernie Sanders and I’ve been a huge critic of Hillary Clinton,” King said, but he found himself “very moved” by The Atlantic‘s action.

What the endorsement says to King is that this dip that we’re in ranks in momentousness with only two other inflection points in American history: the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860; and, in 1964, a time of pivotal choice between civic progress and stability under Johnson, or the undoing of such progress under Barry Goldwater.

Prior to his evening talk, Shaun King visits the course “#blacklivesmatter,” taught by Yannick Marshall, a visiting instructor in African American studies. “When I speak at colleges, this is what I look forward to the most,” he said of meeting �ֲ���ý students. “And this is one of the few Black Lives Matter classes in the country.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Bigger than the endorsement is the realization that, OMG, we are living in one of those times,” King said. “And it made sense to me, deep in my soul, because many of us have felt like it was one of those times.

“What I want you to understand is, we will not get out of that dip by accident. We have never found our way accidentally out of a dip in the quality of humanity.”

He said, “It’s going to take enormous efforts, nationwide reforms, and, I’m very afraid, major sacrifices.”

The concluding Q&A was nearly as meaty as King’s formal address. Smart questioners gave him opportunities to discuss the financial motivations that drive a racist criminal justice system, such as the revenue from fines and bail that was so important to the municipal bottom line in Ferguson, Mo.; and to assess the accomplishments of Black Lives Matter.

Another questioner wondered how to best allocate one’s activist energy with so many social justice problems confronting us. King quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

King allowed that “most of my life, I’ve only fought for issues that directly affected me and my circle. But for the past two or three years, I have tried to practice fighting against xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in this country,” as well as LGBT rights, “even though it is not my life.”

He said, “For all of us in the room, there’s something really powerful about fighting for a problem you don’t have.”

�ֲ���ý’ Office of Equity and Diversity brought King to campus with support from the Athletics department and the programs in African American studies and American Cultural studies.

Peniel Joseph, Tufts University historian and author, delivers �ֲ���ý’ 2015 MLK Day keynote address. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What does the Black Lives Matter movement really want?

Yes, it’s one of those questions that can be driven more by hostility than curiosity. Still, in his keynote address during Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at �ֲ���ý on Jan. 19, historian Peniel Joseph had an answer ready.

“What they want is a new New Deal. They want a greater Great Society,” said Joseph, a professor at Tufts, author and authority on the Black Power movement. “They want an expansive vision of social, economic and political justice that connects democratic ideals to democratic reality.”

From left, �ֲ���ý Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer, President Clayton Spencer and Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker Peniel Joseph have a word as the event begins. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The divorce of ideals from reality was central to the talk, titled Reimagining Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Obama and the Age of Ferguson, that an energetic Joseph offered in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel.

Joseph described a mythologized King, the “prince of peace” that for many has supplanted the reality of King’s last years, when his increasingly radical views made even some fellow black leaders uncomfortable. Joseph also outlined the current resurgence of institutionalized racism in a more insidious form that avoids the language of prejudice while serving its goals.

Against this context, Joseph suggested that the Black Lives Matter movement is a sign of hope — for defenders of both social justice and, in fact, democracy itself — because it supports idealism with effective activism.

In her welcome to a capacity crowd at the Chapel, �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer was pleased to point out that the college’s MLK Day committee had picked the day’s theme — From Selma to Ferguson: 50 Years of Nonviolent Dissent — in September, prior to the grand jury decisions about the police shootings in Ferguson and New York City that elevated outrage to a new level.

The Gomes Chapel audience during the 2015 MLK Day keynote address by Tufts University historian and author Peniel Joseph. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Anticipating Joseph, Spencer said that �ֲ���ý’ choice of theme “shows that we on this campus were prepared to challenge ourselves to acknowledge and act on the ongoing stark gap, nearly five decades after the death of Martin Luther King, between the depth of our ideals as a society and our lived reality.”

�ֲ���ý people have been prepared for that challenge for decades, she said, pointing the important legal victories for civil rights won during the mid-20th century by John P. Davis ’25 and James Nabrit ’52.

Son of a union member who first took him out on a picket line when he was 8 years old, Joseph said, “I come to activism from a real-world point of view.” He provided both historical and moral context for the day’s programming at �ֲ���ý.

Joseph devoted much of his talk to a whirlwind review of signal events in the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965, as King became the leading voice of the movement. These years, which Joseph called the “heroic period” of the movement, began with the U.S. Supreme Court finding that school segregation is unconstitutional in Brown vs. Board of Education; and ended with a year marked with the marches on Selma, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts riots.

If these events were news to many younger listeners in the Gomes Chapel, what came next may have been ear-opening to some older folks as well. Joseph pointed out that during the last three years of his life, King became increasingly radicalized, coming out in opposition to the war in Vietnam and in favor of a guaranteed income for impoverished Americans.

Marcus Bruce, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and Associate Dean of Students James Reese listen to the MLK Day keynote address. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“We need to be willing to speak truth to power, no matter the cost,” King said, and the cost to him was losing access to the political establishment. “There [were] no more massive standing ovations by the mainstream for Dr. King in 1966, ’67 and ’68,” Joseph said.

In Chicago, even black leaders — fearing the loss of such patronage as was available to them from Mayor Richard J. Daley’s benighted political machine — told King he had gone too far.

Today, Joseph said, it’s not uncommon to point to Barack Obama’s presidency as a symbol of how far civil rights have advanced in the U.S. And yet, “the reality that we live in is a much, much, much more complex reality,” Joseph said.

If recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island and Cleveland — where a 12-year-old African America boy carrying a toy gun was killed by police — are high-profile examples of institutionalized racism, Joseph pointed out that conditions for African Americans have gone backward in more deep-seated ways as well, from school segregation to incarceration rates to unemployment and poverty.

Many black children, Joseph pointed out, have their first experience with the criminal justice system when they are arrested in school — as young as age 5 or 6.

“We had a better conversation about race and racism in 1965 than we do now,” Joseph said. “At least in 1965, we admitted that there were structures of racism and racial segregation.” Now our society practices a sort of “color-blind racism,” he said, where laws and policies achieve racist ends while never explicitly mentioning race.

John Smedley, Tim Clough and Dale Chapman — aka the Three Point Trio — opened the King Day keynote event with jazz. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Even as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.,” Joseph said, “we divorce King the icon from King the political activist who’s willing to speak truth to power and who said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

“We celebrate the dreamer, but we divorce the dreamer from the actual dream.”

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Joseph said, shows that the time may not be past, after all, for realizing the dream.

“The most important, and really hopeful and optimistic, aspect that we’re left with, when you think about ‘from Selma to Ferguson,’ is the fact that so many young people, like in the 1960s, are actually not just demonstrating and protesting — they are organizing.

“They are organizing on behalf of social, political, economic and racial justice. And they are organizing to try to fill that gap between democracy as an ideal in America, and democracy as an actual living, breathing fact.”