The Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote began with brief remarks by Akira Townes ’17 of Cockeysville, Md.; Matt Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty; and President Clayton Spencer.

Yannick Marshall, visiting instructor in African American studies, introduced educator and author Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who spoke on “No Reparations Without Racial Education: Martin Luther King on the Tyranny of Ignorance.”

The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Class of 1920, Debate saw ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Morehouse debaters take on this motion: “This house believes the state should exclusively focus on rectifying current inequalities to the exclusion of compensating for historical injustices.â€�

For the Goverment: Tessa Holtzman ’17 of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, a politics major from Las Cruces, N.M., and Mati Baker of Morehouse, a junior African American studies major from Baltimore, Md.

For the Opposition: Zoe Seaman-Grant ’17 of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, a women and gender studies major from Charleston, S.C., and Sha’Heed Brooks of Morehouse a sophomore philosophy major from Fayetteville, N.C.

Earlier in the month, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Grant and her partner Matt Davis ’18 advanced to the finals of the World Universities Debating Championships in the Netherlands.)

Scheduled months ago, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ talk at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ came just hours after Donald Trump’s victory speech and Hillary Clinton’s concession. Talk about timing.

Maine’s senior senator, Republican Collins spoke on Nov. 9 about post-election unity and gave advice to Clinton supporters who now feel isolated.

She spoke of the glass ceiling for women seeking executive office in politics. And she talked about a lesson in courage she learned from the Watergate era.

Collins was interviewed by Maine state Rep. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, who is director of strategic and policy initiatives with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Held in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, the talk was part of the Purposeful Work Unplugged speaker series.

Post-election unity

After listening to Trump’s and Clinton’s post-election speeches, Collins said, “What I was struck by is how each of them stressed the need to unify our country.”

Get involved

Getting involved is an antidote for anyone feeling isolated after their candidate lost the 2016 election. You should “not feel alienated from our country,” Collins said.

Debate without rancor

Students can help elevate the quality of political debate, said Collins.

Glass ceiling in politics

Recalling a story from her unsuccessful run for Maine governor in 1994, when a man told her he couldn’t imagine a woman as governor, Collins says there still is a glass ceiling in politics today.

Self-doubt among aspiring women politicians

In her experience recruiting women and men to run for elected office, Collins says that women invariably harbor doubts about their readiness. Men never do.

Overcoming setbacks defines who you are

How you deal with setbacks in life, Collins said, “shapes how people perceive you” and sets the stage for opportunities later.

Taking a risk means no regrets later

In deciding to run for U.S. Senate in 1996 after losing a three-way election for governor in 1994, Collins said she didn’t want to look back someday with regrets.

The last compromiser?

Collins, often rated , believes both parties “can have good ideas.”

Problem with primaries

Primaries tend to create polarizing candidates, Collins said, because many moderates aren’t enrolled in parties.

Women and collaboration

There are exceptions, but Collins believes that women in Congress tend to be more collaborative than men.

What unites women in the Senate

Collins offers an idea of what might unite the 22 women in the U.S. Senate. And it’s not ideology.

Lesson from Watergate

In college, Collins worked for then-U.S. Rep. Bill Cohen during the summer of the Watergate crisis. From Cohen, a Maine Republican who would go on to become senator and secretary of defense, Collins learned a valuable life lesson.

Picking potatoes

When she was growing up in Caribou, Maine, a defining moment of community-building came during the potato harvest.

Advising her past self

Collins offers advice that she would have given to her college-age self.

Public service

Lessons in public service came from her family, said Collins.

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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was that American society has lapsed into a “dip” in morality and behavior. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students. “And this is one of the few Black Lives Matter classes in the country.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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.”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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.