Brooke Drabkin ’18 of Roslyn, N.Y., describes her surprise at the importance that off-campus relationships played in her �ֲ���ý experience.

“Spending time with the Jewish community in Lewiston-Auburn has really opened my eyes to the differences that can exist in one tradition,” says Drabkin, a history major who has been co-president of �ֲ���ý Hillel.

https://vimeo.com/266351678

With a minor in education, Drabkin has been active in local literacy efforts. She joined six other �ֲ���ý students to research the effectiveness of literature circles in English-language learning in Lewiston schools.

“We come to �ֲ���ý and live in Lewiston for four years, and I think it’s really important to emphasize that piece,” she says. “We are Lewiston residents.”

At Convocation, the �ֲ���ý community looks forward to the new academic year, surrounded by the college’s beech, ash, and pine trees, some of them more than a century old.

Following this year’s ceremony, a service held near the Class of 1929 Gate honored 17 faculty and staff who had died in the past year, in whose memory a young red oak was planted.

A memorial service as part of Convocation — to acknowledge grief and loss while welcoming new people — has been a �ֲ���ý tradition for 20 years.

During the service, Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf invited faculty, staff, students, friends, and family to come forward to a bowl filled from Lake Andrews. Those who did collected and poured water cupful by cupful onto the soil around the tree, to keep it healthy and strong.

Members of the �ֲ���ý community participate in a memorial service near the Class of 1929 Gate immediately following the Convocation on Tuesday. A red oak was planted in memory of those in the �ֲ���ý community who died during the past year.

“The community that’s gone and the community that’s just arriving — it’s actually a beautiful gesture to say, dead or alive, you’re still a part of the �ֲ���ý community,” Longsdorf says.

The trees surrounding the memorial red oak sapling are — like the �ֲ���ý community — young and old, short and tall, of many different kinds. Many are themselves memorial trees.

The tradition was started in 1997 by College Chaplain Kerry Maloney, who is now Harvard Divinity School’s chaplain and director of religious and spiritual life.

“I wanted to tie so many holy endings to the great holy beginning of each new academic year,”  Maloney says.

“We embrace this complexity, this sacred tension between grateful remembrance and grief.”

Landscape architect Bill Bergevin, who selected and planted the red oak about three weeks ago, will continue to water the sapling until it’s ready to thrive on its own. In the next 60 years or more, it will grow tall like the older trees surrounding it. Friends and family of those departed can return to it. Students will pass it daily; they might lean against it to read books, or escape underneath it for shade.

During that time, the tree will become part of the �ֲ���ý community, while it stands as a sign of the pain of loss and of the joy of remembrance, says Longsdorf.

“We embrace this complexity, this sacred tension between grateful remembrance and grief,” she said during the ceremony. “Thus we water new life in the form of a small tree, embracing that complexity and embracing the hope that we continue to honor our colleagues’ memory and presence that lingers still.”

The faculty and staff whose lives are commemorated by the red oak are: Robert P. Bowen Sr., John W. Creasy, Roger C. Dutil, Kenneth Fitzherbert, James G. Hepburn, Yvette A. LaChapelle, Marcia A. Makris, Bernice I. Michel, Kenneth Moore, Germaine J. Morin, Margaret T. Nichols, Marcy Plavin, Judy Rosen, Paul M. Szott, Kate L. Vale, and Beatrice C. Verville.

Religious studies professor Marcus Bruce ’77 began a recent interview about Benjamin Mays by noting a historic coincidence.

“Since we’re talking about Mays, I’d forgotten how significant this day is,” Bruce said.

The day was Dec. 5, the 61st anniversary of a seminal moment in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: the start of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks’ arrest and famously led by the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

And at a pivotal moment in the boycott, Bruce says, “Mays was instrumental” in bolstering King’s confidence to continue his leadership.

Bruce should know: He’s the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and last fall he taught a course on Mays, the 20th-century civil rights leader, theologian, Morehouse College president, mentor to King, and 1920 �ֲ���ý graduate.

How did Mays influence King during the boycott?

Sixty-one years ago, in the summer of 1956, King had left Montgomery midway through the boycott, first to appear at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and then to visit his parents in Atlanta, where he learned that he would be arrested if he returned to Montgomery.

King’s father invited prominent African American leaders, including Mays, to the King home in Atlanta to help his son think through the consequences of staying in Atlanta rather than going back and being arrested.

Many in the group urged King to stay in Atlanta, but King said he would return to Montgomery. Silence followed, and his father burst into tears. At that moment, King later wrote, “I looked at Dr. Mays, one of the great influences in my life. Perhaps he had heard my unspoken plea. At any rate, he was soon defending my position strongly. Then others joined in supporting me.”

At a point critical to not just the boycott but to the movement itself, it was Mays’ voice and support that King felt.

Did you ever meet Mays?

I met Dr. Mays once when I was a student. I was a member of what was called the Afro-American Society at �ֲ���ý. We were having a potluck meal in the bottom of Parker Hall, and he surprised us. He just appeared out of nowhere. I don’t know why he was on campus but he just spent time with us and it was really wonderful.

For a long time, many of us at �ֲ���ý didn’t know much about him other than he was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mentor. In the 1990s, a few of us — the late Bob Branham, Beckie Conrad ’82, and myself — traveled to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University to look at Mays’ papers for the 1994 Symposium at �ֲ���ý celebrating the centennial of his birth. I began to get a strong sense of Mays’ influence on American religious history and thought during that trip and the conference that followed.

When I look at Mays and think about his relevance or importance, I think it goes back to his phrase that “�ֲ���ý didn’t emancipate me, but it did me the greater service of helping me to emancipate myself.” That’s what stands out.

For Mays, emancipating himself meant competing with and doing better than white students in his studies and activities. What do you take away from his focus on competition to prove his self-worth?

He wanted to lay to rest any doubts that he, or anyone else for that matter, might have about his intellectual ability. Mays was born and raised in a segregated society where the prevailing idea was that African Americans were intellectually inferior.

He wanted to prove to himself that he could hold his own in any educational context. He thought �ֲ���ý was a place where he could do that — where he would be accepted but also where he could challenge himself and learn to overcome any anxieties or obstacles that might arise. And he did very well.

Do we know if that was a typical experience of Southern African Americans who went to Northern schools, to frame their goals in competitive terms?

Certainly, it was true of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in Great Barrington, Mass., yet earned a degree from Fisk University and then got a second B.A. at Harvard because he wanted to prove himself there — he wanted to see if he could hold his own.

There were a number of African Americans who did this, but quite often the schools they wanted to attend wouldn’t admit them. Individuals like Mays and Du Bois were determined to demonstrate their ability to succeed in any academic environment, again laying to rest for themselves and others the negative stereotypes and myths about the capabilities of African Americans.

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920, photographed in 1980 when he returned to �ֲ���ý for his 60th Reunion. Photograph by Jim Daniels.

Mays begins his autobiography, Born to Rebel, at age 4 or 5 by describing his father being harassed by night riders. Instilled at an early age, that fear — of segregation, of the consequences of crossing the color line — was something that Mays fought against until his dying day.

For him, the color line wasn’t simply the cultural, social, or political practices of segregation. They were things that he didn’t want to internalize. He wanted to overcome them.

Since the presidential election, where are your students in their thinking?

They’re thinking about ways to remain engaged in the political process, ways to be heard. I keep holding up Mays as an example. I’ve said that Mays wasn’t able to vote until he was almost 52 years old. And from the moment he set out to get an education, Mays believed education would help liberate him from the fears and the normative ideas or practices around race and segregation.

Mays saw and experienced segregation in one form or another for his entire life. He was still preaching against different kinds of segregation until his dying day. So there’s this whole idea that you don’t give up the fight, that you never give up, that we’re always engaged in this struggle for emancipation.

So education still has the power to liberate students from fear?

That’s why Mays’ words are in our mission statement. We believe that education is emancipating. Mays looked at education as a way to liberate people from ignorance and fear and to help them to envision new possibilities for themselves and for society.

He said that he believed that everyone had something to give to humanity. And if they didn’t do the work that they were capable of, then that work wouldn’t get done.

That connects to Mays’ eulogy for King, when he said that there’s no such thing as someone, like King, being “ahead of their time” because the time is “always ripe to do that which is right and that which needs to be done.”

We’re reading the eulogy now. I always think that’s so powerful, that he was able to say that, to have this vision of King as being “of his time” and speaking to his time in a very specific way. King seemed to view his life in the same way. He really does talk about being in this place at this moment.

Mays delivers the final eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. on April 9, 1968, at Morehouse College. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

King also gives you a sense of his journey. At the time of the boycott, he talks about how his journey connected with the local leadership and action, with the discontent among people experiencing the injustices of segregation. And how there was power in one small, seemingly insignificant gesture by Rosa Parks of just sitting down — it wasn’t the first time — and how her being arrested connected with people and ignited something. All of this played a part in the emergence and organization of the Civil Rights movement.

To stay engaged in the process — that’s the challenge!

I think something like that is happening right now. People are being challenged to think: What does it mean to be an American citizen? What does it mean to be free? What involvement and what place do I have in the political process?

Your candidate may not have won but does that mean that you walk away from the process and leave the responsibility to someone else? Or is there work you can continue to do to promote your idea of what it means to be free or an American? To stay engaged in the process — that’s the challenge!

Free Will Baptists founded �ֲ���ý. Is there something about how they interpreted their gospel and teachings that resembles what Mays and King were doing?

The Free Will Baptists’ social and political commitments — abolitionism, temperance, education — came from their religious convictions. They believed that it was their responsibility, their duty, to transform the world around them and to look at the Sermon on the Mount as their practical way: that you feed the hungry, you clothe the naked, you visit those who are in prison, and you take care of the homeless.

Mays, like King, believed and practiced a “social gospel” that applied to every aspect of individual’s life and involvement with others. If the gospel only meant something on Sunday mornings or in your private meditations, then that wasn’t really the gospel message. For Mays and Dr. King, the gospel had a social message, one of social reform, social change, and realizing the Kingdom of God in the world.

What should we know about Mays’ meeting with Mahatma Gandhi?

It shows that he was part of a small group of African American scholars and intellectuals who were looking at India’s struggle against imperialism and colonialism as a way to help their own strategies for addressing segregation in the U.S.

Mays engaged Gandhi around the whole question of nonviolent resistance. And when you see that happening in 1936, you see that he is thinking, “How can I use this same strategy, this same approach, in the U.S.?”

It also shows how he was becoming an international figure, too.

Was Mays ever criticized?

Sometimes people wonder just how involved he was in the civil rights movement. Well, he was very involved, educating the next generation of leaders, working behind the scenes, donating money, supporting the leadership and individuals within the movement, especially Dr. King and some others.

The only criticism that I do know of came later in the 1960s with a whole new generation of political activists. These were enormously important years in the consciousness of African Americans: black pride, Black Power, and a new kind of militant activism were emerging.

“Initially, my students just see Mays as someone ‘out there,'” says Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. By the end of the course, they’ve begun to appreciate “the trials, tribulations, abuses he had to suffer.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Mays very firmly believed in the possibility of African Americans, but he wanted to go the route of education and help African Americans gain leadership positions in every field. Mays was seen by some younger activists as “old school” and out of step in this regard — as, on occasion, was King.

Recently I visited Paris and saw an exhibit called The Color Line at the Quai Branly Museum that looks at African American experience, from slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement, through the lens of art. When I came to the section on the 1960s, there were pictures of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and, in one glass case, Mays’ book Born to Rebel.

It struck me: Do they know the extent, intensity, and complexity of the differences and visions that existed between Mays’ and a new generation of African American activists? What we now celebrate as a period of rich diversity of ideas among African Americans was a painful and difficult period in Civil Rights history.

I have seen an interview with Mays where he talks about seeing the pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation in Lewiston, and afterward running back to campus because he feared for his safety.

He said it was the only time when he felt in danger in Lewiston. He felt real hostility and anger in that audience, and it frightened him. He saw the power of the medium to frighten people and generate mindless aggression and anger toward someone like him.

While he didn’t write specifically about Birth of a Nation, he wrote about another film, The Green Pastures, a popular Broadway musical in 1930 with an all-black cast that became a film with an all-black cast in 1936.

The movie depicts Bible stories through stereotypes of African Americans. It portrays God as a black man, “De Lawd,” speaking a black dialect — not correct or proper English speech — and scenarios that painted a quaint, folksy, stereotypically exaggerated image of African Americans and religious belief. Heaven is described as a fish fry.

Mays begins the book that is his dissertation, The Negro’s God: As Reflected in His Literature, by talking about The Green Pastures because he was bothered by the stereotypical depiction of how African Americans viewed God. He wanted his book to be a work of scholarship that recovered the richness and diversity of conceptions of African American ideas about God in their literature, in their scholarship, in their poetry.

Are there parts of Mays’ experience that don’t resonate with your students?

Many of my students raise questions about Mays’ particular attention to the role of race and gender in the education of young black men, especially the idea of Mays, when he was president of Morehouse, emphasizing the masculinity of young Morehouse men and their graduates.

I tell them that Mays taught the young African American men of Morehouse the “lessons” he had learned in his life and career, lessons in “how to be free in a segregated world,” how to define themselves by their “own terms in a world that offered no terms for their existence.”

Anna Marr ’17, an environmental studies major from Larchmont, N.Y., makes a point on Dec. 8 during the Benjamin Mays course taught by Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Initially, my students just see Mays as a prominent and successful African American who attended �ֲ���ý. They’ve heard references to him at �ֲ���ý but they don’t know him. By the end of the course, they’ve become more intimate with him and begun to appreciate the decisions and choices and the life he led, and the trials, tribulations, and abuses he had to suffer.

And they begin to understand why he designed the Morehouse educational experience in a particular way, always exhorting students to do their best, to be competitive, and to believe they were just as talented and deserving as everyone else in the world.

At weekly chapel gatherings, Mays would give Morehouse students a phrase or saying that they could hang on to — quotes that they would keep for the remainder of their lives, that would serve as principles that would guide them in any situation.

I tell my students about this practice and then ask them, “What guides you, what are your principles?” And I always emphasize that Mays is a fellow �ֲ���ý College graduate. I say, “You can do as much, if not more, as Mays, a �ֲ���ý graduate. What are you learning from your education? What are you taking away from your experience at �ֲ���ý that will allow you to navigate the world and guide you through the rest of the world?”

What is another aspect of Mays that they might struggle with?

Sometimes Mays’ competitiveness, as you’ve described it, and his emphasis on always listing what he had achieved, is a bit off-putting to them. I had to learn to appreciate it myself. I thought, “Why does he keep listing this, that, and the other thing?” But I learned that it was a way for him to chart his course, assess his progress and to push himself to do even more.

Ben Coulibay ’17, a philosophy major from Philadelphia, joins the discussion on Dec. 8 during the Benjamin Mays course taught by Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The point is, he was always trying to see how far he had come and what he achieved. It wasn’t simply his ego. It was about, “How free am I? What have I done to improve the community, the nation and the world of which I am a part?” He did that by listing his accomplishments or what he had been able to achieve at Howard and Morehouse and throughout the course of his life and career.

So long before anybody appreciated him, Benjamin Mays appreciated himself.

This is a man who was the son of former slaves, and he wanted to remind people of the fact that he got a degree from �ֲ���ý College, that he had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and that he was dean of the School of Religion at Howard University and president of Morehouse College for 27 years. He had come a long way and achieved a great deal!

So long before anybody appreciated him, Benjamin Mays appreciated himself. That is kind of amazing.

What’s the one thing we should know about Benjamin Mays?

He was a greater man and a greater individual than we know. He had a far greater and wider impact than we actually know.

Besides appreciating him as a writer — he wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, an influential African American newspaper, for years — and as a scholar, as someone involved in the Civil Rights movement, and as a mentor for King, he was also an international figure, too. This is a man who was part of YMCA International and the World Council of Churches. He met and worked with hundreds of leaders around the world and had leadership positions with various national and international organizations.

The other thing that strikes me is his ongoing struggle for emancipation. I started out with the phrase — “�ֲ���ý didn’t emancipate me” — and then you look at what he meant by “emancipation,” and it’s ongoing.

When we think of “emancipation,” is it usually some 19th-century idea and event, the Emancipation Proclamation and a group of African Americans, some formerly enslaved, some free, who are struggling to define freedom for themselves and the country? No! The greatness of this country is that we keep defining “emancipation.”

The phrase that rings with me is Lincoln’s from the Gettysburg’s Address: “This nation shall have a new birth of freedom.” We tend to think that freedom was born a long time ago and it’s done. No! The process of defining freedom goes on.

Each �ֲ���ý student — all of us here — is a new birth of freedom. Now are we going to articulate that? How are we going to do that? It’s not easy. It’s painful because somebody over there might think, “That’s a ridiculous idea.”

But that is part of the process. So that is what strikes me this year, that Mays represents a new birth of freedom and encourages all of us to work through our ideas and our practice of freedom.

Corrections to this story were published at 6 p.m. Jan. 6, 2017.

Jackson Whitehouse '17 of Cleveland, Ohio, plays the guitar during Pause on Nov. 30.

Multifaith fellow Denali Nalamalapu '17 of Falmouth, Maine, reads the Jorge Luis Borges poem "Boast of Quietness."

Students gather by candlelight in the Gomes Chapel on Nov. 30 2016 for Pause.

Even as the academic intensity increases heading into the end of the semester, students can rely on one constant. Every Wednesday evening in the Gomes Chapel throughout the semester, students gather by candlelight for {Pause}, a secular service of music, poetry, silence, dance, and art.

The service runs about half an hour, beginning and ending with the playing of a crystal singing bowl, a traditional Eastern meditation aid whose sound reverberates throughout the chapel. In between, students offer readings, songs, or dance. “You get to sit back in the middle of the week in a candlelit chapel and just be,” said Denali Nalamalapu ’17 of Falmouth, Maine.

Nalamalapu first attended {Pause} as a sophomore, and now, as a Multifaith Fellow, produces the programming every week. During the Nov. 30 gathering, she read the Jorge Luis Borges poem “Boast of Quietness,” which opens the novel Inheritance of Loss that she is studying for literature thesis.

“It’s nice to be able to literally just take a pause and be in silence.”

“There are so many demands on �ֲ���ý students and schedules are usually full to the brim,” said Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf. “We hope {Pause} can create a moment of quiet respite in the week.”

Jackson Whitehouse ’17 of Cleveland, Ohio, played several acoustic guitar pieces on Wednesday, yet he was quick to highlight the restorative absence of sound during {Pause}.

“Silence is a very important thing,” he said, noting the 30 pages of writing soon due for class. “It’s nice to be able to literally just take a pause and be in silence with a bunch of other people who are just decompressing.”

Here’s how MLK Day 2016 looked — what was said and read, and what was acted, sung, and pondered — as the campus community and invited guests from near and far came together to work on the theme “Mass Incarceration and Black Citizenship.”

7:02 p.m., Jan. 17

The college’s MLK observance began with Sunday evening’s traditional MLK Memorial Worship Service in Gomes Chapel, which encompassed dance, music, and spoken word. The homily was delivered by the Rev. Peter Paris, author and professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary.

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

8:20 a.m., Jan. 18

The day got an early start. Chris Petrella ’06, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Assistant Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque gave the day’s events and theme, “Mass Incarceration and Black Citizenship,” a solid foundation by presenting a whirlwind survey of pertinent issues.

Among the staggering facts and figures:

• By the end of 2014, nearly seven million Americans were subject to some sort of correctional supervision.
• The U.S. incarceration rate is the world’s highest. According to the , for every 100,000 people, the U.S. has 716 behind bars; the United Kingdom, 147; Canada, 118; and Norway, 72.
• From 1974 to 2014, the incarceration rate has skyrocketed — increasing fivefold.
• Convictions for drug offenses drove the increase. In 1980, federal prisons held some 4,700 individuals for drug offenses. In 2014, the number was 96,500.
• Racial disparities in imprisonment rates are striking. Just one white American out of 17 is likely to be imprisoned, while the rate is far higher among Latino men (one in six) and black men (one in three).
• One in 117 white women will be imprisoned vs. one in 45 Latina women and one in 18 black women.

In Gomes Chapel, just before the MLK Day keynote, Christopher Petrella ’06 discusses issues surrounding imprisonment. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

8:55 a.m., Jan. 18

The MLK keynote session started with remarks by President Clayton Spencer:

Particularly relevant to our topic today, Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow that the mass incarceration of young men of color, initiated by the war on drugs and carried through to the jaw-dropping incarceration rates of today, is simply the latest move in a highly adaptive system of racial exclusion that extends back to the earliest history of the nation….

We have to ask ourselves: At �ֲ���ý, even with our storied history — no, especially with our storied history — in what ways do our very own culture, structures, unthinking ways, and even conscious ways marginalize students and others of color whom we invite to be here and promise full participation?

And what are we going to do about it?

From left, President Clayton Spencer, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Associate Professor of History Joe Hall, and MLK Day keynote speaker Jelani Cobb. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:21 a.m., Jan. 18

In his remarks, U.S. Sen. Angus King recalled the 1963 March on Washington:

Fifty-two years ago, Americans marched to Washington’s great National Mall. … Those people came to Washington drawn by a radical idea — an idea that’s at the heart of the American experience, an idea that was new to the world in 1776, tested in 1865, renewed in 1963, and an idea still new and radical today in much of the world.

That idea is that all men and women are created equal.

Fifty-two years ago at that sacred place, Americans sent a message to their leaders and to the world: that the promise of equality of opportunity, equality before the law, equality of the right to freely participate in the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship, apply to everyone in a country, not just the lucky few of the right color or accident of birth.

This is what Martin Luther King meant when he said that his dream was deeply rooted in the American dream.

U.S. Sen. Angus King speaks during the college’s MLK Day gathering in the Gomes Chapel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

9:41 a.m., Jan. 18

In his keynote, Jelani Cobb includes an acutely personal example of racial double standards.

“I’m old enough to remember the scourge of heroin when it first emerged and was largely considered a drug problem among black and brown people,” he said. Cobb’s oldest brother became addicted to heroin while serving in Vietnam and died of an HIV infection contracted while he was using heroin.

The surge of heroin use among people of color was, in part, “the basis for the beginning of the ‘War on Drugs’ and the mass incarceration that has accompanied it,” Cobb said.

Today’s conversation about heroin use is “staggeringly different.”

Cobb compared that era with recent comments from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “He spoke movingly about ways in which drug abuse has ruined families and the ways in which it’s a cause for all of our sympathies and concerns.”

Hearing Christie’s remarks, Cobb noticed that today’s conversation about heroin use is “staggeringly different.” Now that heroin is a crisis “among young white people,” Cobb said, it’s curious that Christie did not say that “we should respond to this problem by locking more people up.”

Jelani Cobb delivers the MLK Day keynote in the Gomes Chapel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

10:30 a.m., Jan. 18

The key question during a panel on “Global Accounts of State Violence and Identity” came from a student, and it came after we’d heard three senior anthropology majors talk about their thesis fieldwork, which, in each case, had brought them face to face with victims of trauma or physical violence.

The question: What’s it like to ask people questions about their grief, trauma, and pain? The answer, each senior said, is to focus on the person’s humanity.

Create spaces that allow kindness.

“You respond to the people as if one of your close friends had shared something difficult,” said Detmer Kremer of Nij Beets, Netherlands, who shared findings about the anti-refugee movement in the Netherlands and religious exclusion in Samoa.

“You provide opportunities to stop the interview, to halt the process, to create spaces that allow kindness to be part of the process.”

He was joined by Ashley Bryant of Medfield, Mass., who talked about anti-Muslim sentiment in American public schools, and Carly Peruccio of Manchester, Conn., who described women’s experiences during Morocco’s era of state-sponsored violence against dissidents, the “Years of Lead,” from the 1960s to 1980s.

A student listens to the panel discussion on “Global Accounts of State Violence and Identity.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

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10:31 a.m., Jan. 18

A poster in the “mouthpiece” display case announces the MLK Day theme.

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

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11:37 a.m. Jan. 18

“We are trying to make a change but we are the minority. We need you to pitch in as a community for the future generations. Whether you know it or not, you have the power to change the world, to make it safer for us people of color.”

With that statement, actor Mouamed M. broke the fourth wall in Schaeffer Theatre during the premiere of Something’s Wrong Here, a play written and performed by two youth groups, Maine Inside Out and the MLK Fellows.

A shift to “accountability and connection.”

Co-founded by Margot Fine ’03, Maine Inside Out collaborates with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to create and share original theater. The Maine Inside Out cast members of Something’s Wrong Here comprised current and former residents of the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland.

“The goal is to shift from our current culture of punishment and isolation to one of accountability and connection,” explained Fine.

The MLK Fellows, sponsored by a Portland-based youth development program, contributed to the play by punctuating several scenes with original poetry, which elicited a cacophony of appreciative snaps from audience members, and reciting statistics on poverty levels, literacy rates, and the growing number of incarcerated people of color in Maine.

A scene from Something’s Wrong Here, performed on MLK Day. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

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11:39 a.m., Jan. 18

Visitors from high schools along with participants in MLK Day events walk toward Commons for lunch.

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

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12:03 p.m., Jan. 18

A selection of images from workshops that brought �ֲ���ý people and guests together for discussion and thought:

• “Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Criminalization of HIV/AIDS,” led by Professor of Rhetoric Charles Nero;
• “Power and Complacency in American Incarceration and Our Community,” led by the Stringfellow Coordinators of the Multifaith Chaplaincy;
• “International Criminal Court: A Step Toward Global Justice?” led by the Africana Club;
• “Should Environmentalists Also Be Prison Abolitionists?” led by environmental studies lecturer Ethan Miller ’00.

(Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

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1:24 p.m. Jan. 18

Each MLK Day, several faculty, students, and staff read from texts that have inspired them. Here are brief video excerpts from six readings, in this order:

Jeremy Glover ’17 of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, reading from in Cleveland on April 26, 1967. “My mother was in attendance,” Glover said, “so it has a special importance in my life.”

Helene Sudac ’19 of Lake Forest, Ill., reading from “,” by James Baldwin (1962).

Caleb Perlman ’19 of Carlisle, Mass., reading from , by Thich Nhat Hahn (1995).

Joseph Hall, associate professor of history, reading from , by William Apes (1836).

Jessica Perez, assistant dean in Student Affairs, reading from , by Grace Lee Boggs (2011).

Jamil Drake, visiting assistant professor of religious studies, reading from King’s speech ,” delivered at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967.

2:40 p.m., Jan. 18

At an MLK Day workshop exploring how �ֲ���ý is adopting principles and practices of restorative justice, there was no shame in holding a stuffed cow called Stuart while you spoke.

In fact, sans Stuart, you didn’t speak. Under the rules of a “restorative circle” exercise, you spoke only when the cow came to you. Otherwise, you practiced active listening.

The group put the concept into practice during the session by talking about the at U.S. colleges and universities.

Leading the exercise were Robert Ibarra ’17 of Los Angeles and Katie Stevenson ’17 of Ewing, N.J. They get plenty of practice: as Mediation and Restorative Justice Fellows in the Student Life office, they have been leading restorative circles and related exercises around campus this year.

Their hope is to teach the �ֲ���ý community that responding to student misconduct can focus on redressing harm rather than on punishment.

“Trust the circle.”

The other workshop leaders, Carl Steidel of the Student Affairs office and psychology professor Georgia Nigro, are establishing restorative justice as an alternative approach in student conduct proceedings.

The circular discussion and “talking piece,” aka Stuart, are key. They enable “people to get to the stuff that they need to get to,” Steidel said. “Trust the circle.”

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

4:03 p.m., Jan. 18

This year’s traditional Benjamin Mays Debate gave student debaters from �ֲ���ý and Morehouse a chance to argue the value of police reform vs. prison reform.

Morehouse sophomore Best Uchehara supported the Government position, in favor of police reform:

“Ethnic minorities of America have been robbed of justice. Beaten mercilessly at the hands of law enforcement officials who are supposed to be just. Burdened by frequent targeting and racial profiling. Berated, with an unjust reality that lies contrary to what is promised in the Constitution. We, on the side of the Government, believe that enough is enough. We need reform.”

Morehouse College sophomore debater Best Uchehara argues for police reform. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

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4:25 p.m., Jan. 18

Michael Stone ’17 of Litchfield, N.H., and Keith Matier, a sophomore at Morehouse College, argued for prison reform.

Police are merely “gatekeepers” of the criminal justice system, said Stone. Solving mass incarceration means rehabilitating prisoners and reducing the stigma they face when they return to society. Ultimately, reform would mean lower poverty rates and greater employment.

Without reform, said Matier, being imprisoned will continue to create less-productive Americans. “When I see a prison…I say, ‘That is a place I do not want to go because I’m going to be relegated to social, economic, and political inferiority.”

Michael Stone ’17 of Litchfield, N.H., and Keith Matier, a sophomore at Morehouse College, discuss strategy to counter the Government’s position. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

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7:38 p.m., Jan. 18

An annual expression of pride and accomplishment for members of the African diaspora at �ֲ���ý, this year’s edition of Sankofa on MLK Day shared experiences of Afro-women internationally, linked by the theme of storytelling and friendship.

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A scene from Sankofa's 2016 MLK Day performance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

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1:48 p.m., Jan. 19

The day after MLK Day, Adam Blau ’18 of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and James Reese, longtime dean in Student Affairs who is a founder of the college’s MLK Day tradition, were among volunteers who read to Lewiston schoolchildren at the Martel School during the annual MLK Read-In.

(Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

(Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

(Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Reporting by Leanne Ouimet, Doug Hubley, and Jay Burns.

Millions of Americans have slipped and slid into poverty in recent years because of their own financial ignorance, the erosion of mutual helpfulness in society and predatory megachurches that espouse prosperity theology at parishioners’ expense.

But getting the estimated 46 million poor Americans out of poverty will require wholesale changes in how we talk about, think about and take action around poverty.

So said author, religious studies scholar and media commentator Anthea Butler, keynote speaker for the college’s 2013 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance on Jan. 21.

Anthea Butler, associate professor and graduate chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, delivers her keynote address, “MLK and America’s Bad Check: America’s Poor in the 21st Century” in the Gomes Chapel. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Delivered from the Gomes Chapel pulpit, Butler’s address, “MLK and America’s Bad Check: America’s Poor in the 21st Century,” was a pointed reflection on the overall theme for the college’s observance, Debt and Inequality: The Relevance of King’s Forgotten Economic Message.

Her prescriptive message on Monday morning represented something of an answer to the homily she offered the night before at the MLK Memorial Service.

The homily, based on the book of Isaiah and the theme of captivity, was referenced by Charles Nero, professor of rhetoric and faculty member of the African American Studies and American Cultural Studies programs, as he introduced Butler on Monday in his role as chair of the MLK Planning Committee. Nero said:

Dr. Butler argued convincingly that we as a nation are in captivity. We are in captivity to guns, to debt, to fear, to poverty. How do we make our way out of this captivity, Dr. Butler asked. This is the question, she says, we must ask ourselves.

The day’s theme reflects Martin Luther King Jr. focus on poverty beginning in 1967, a “forgotten economic message” today. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

In her keynote, Butler began her to question her question by looking back at the Poor People’s Campaign, a six-week program of nonviolent action in Washington, D.C., in the late spring of 1968.

“I’m a historian,” explained Butler, an associate professor and graduate chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “Looking back is an important way to look forward.”

The Poor People’s Campaign, King’s brainchild and undertaken after his April 1968 assassination, marked a turning point of the civil rights movement. Despite the Great Society programs and gains of the civil rights movement, “Negros are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society,” King said.

In other words, said Butler, it didn’t mean much to be able to sit at the lunch counter “if you couldn’t afford the hamburger being sold at the lunch counter.”

The Poor People’s Campaign featured an encampment on the Washington Mall. It became a place where activists collaborated around a loose set of goals; where protesters lived in tents and lean-tos; and where a system of food distribution kept everyone fed.

Protesters march at Lafayette Park and Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., on June 18, 1968, during the Poor People’s Campaign. Photo: Warren Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Butler compared it to the Occupy movement, where people “came together to start to think about what can you do about poverty and impoverishment in this nation.” In a society of dizzying distraction, the Occupy movement was a rarity:

It was a moment in America where we focused our attention on people who were willing to camp out and say the economic system was wrong. How do we get that again? How do we start to talk about inequities without movements like Occupy? How do you do that?

One step, said Butler, is to change the way we talk and think about poverty in America. If King were alive today, she said, he’d be appalled that 15 percent of Americans live in poverty. But he’d be more appalled at the poor-are-lazy meme in society and the fact that “helping people has become a bad word,” she said:

I call this the nation’s new Ayn Rand philosophy: We’re all on our own; we can choose to be selfish; we don’t have to help anyone; and those we see who are impoverished are there because they want to be.

Butler launched her fiercest criticism at the “prosperity gospel.” Mostly identified with televangelists and Sun Belt megachurches, this theology suggests that good things come to those who don’t wait. “All you have to is quote enough Scripture, pay your tithes, pay your offerings,” and you’ll become prosperous, Butler says. “It tells you that can have your best life now.”

Robert Strong, graduate fellowship adviser and faculty member in English, and others respond to keynote speaker Anthea Butler’s call for a show of hands of student-loan holders. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

But that’s hardly true, Butler says. Whereas the African American church traditionally included sound financial advice as part of its ministry, the rise of the prosperity gospel has destroyed that tradition — to the great detriment of church parishioners.

It’s no surprise that Atlanta has had one of the country’s highest foreclosure rates, Butler said, because the metro area is home to prosperity gospel churches, like the Creflo Dollar Ministries and Bishop Eddie Long Ministries, that preach financial irresponsibility. The region’s failed mortgages “were bought by people paying attention to the prosperity gospel.”

The prosperity gospel is emblematic of a moral change in Christian society, she said:

The moral center has changed in the community; the moral center has been to give to your church and help each other, now the church has become a capitalist place to make more money. This is wrong.

It’s a problem bigger than religion, she said. “All of us have a part of this. We’re not training people about money. We have a country of people who don’t know the value of money. We spend and we spend and we spend.”

Solving the poverty problem needs to move beyond the more government / less government argument, Butler said. It even needs to move beyond discussion and posturing.

“I’m tired of the bus tours,” she said, perhaps a reference to the high-profile “Poverty Tour” by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West in 2011. “I don’t know what it gets you if you ride a bus, but you haven’t done anything about feeding someone at the local homeless shelter,” she said.

After the morning keynote, a variety of afternoon panel discussions featured community leaders, students and faculty. Featuring recent �ֲ���ý sociology research, this panel discussed ways to build financial literary among Lewiston-Auburn’s immigrant community. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Instead of observing, we must “realize that we have poor people who will be intrinsically harmed, and their children will be intrinsically harmed” if we do not take action to help.

Helping, she said, means “changing the rhetoric about poverty and inequality.”

Helping, she said, means “working on poverty in your community. Push back against the language that says you can’t help someone. You might even consider put yourself on the line, in a religious or nonreligious environment, working with those who are homeless.”

She closed with a story about a homeless man in her neighborhood who had resigned himself to his homeless fate. “I’m old,” he told Butler during one of their conversations. “But I wonder how it’s going to be for all the rest of you?”

Earlier in the morning, as the keynote audience arrived at Gomes Chapel, they were warmed up by Three Point Jazz Trio (physicist John Smedley on guitar, music professor Dale Chapman on alto sax, and community member Tim Clough on bass) and their final number, Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.”

After all that jazz, Associate Dean of Students James Reese, considered a founder of the King Day observance at �ֲ���ý offered a few remarks that drew gasps and applause from the gathering: see story.

Associate Dean of Students James Reese greets Linda Kugblenu ’13 and Victor Babatunde ’11 after the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Service on Jan. 20 in the Gomes Chapel. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Following Reese, President Clayton Spencer invoked the day’s “spirit of self-challenge rather than self-congratulation” by emphasizing that economic inequality should not been seen as inevitable result of “globalization, technology, and cheap manufacturing costs elsewhere in the world.”

Rather, she said, quoting Nelson Mandela, “like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”

Spencer said that colleges like �ֲ���ý “have a choice to make” about their role in solving poverty, about “whether we will succumb to the forces of inequality or throw our institutional weight, however small it may be, into counteracting these forces”:

We make the choice a matter of shared values when we encounter each and every member of this community as an individual deserving of dignity, respect and the opportunity for self-realization.

Following Spencer, Dean of the Faculty Pam Baker ’69’s overview noted that “hand in hand” with the opportunity for study and reflection in a college setting is the responsibility to take “informed and ethical action.”

In that vein, King Day programming “challenges us to think critically about privilege and responsibility, poverty and opportunity, justice and equality.”

Performers in the annual Sankofa production, including director Alex Bolden ’13 (center, in suit), acknowledge the audience’s applause after their evening performance on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

The �ֲ���ý College Chapel became the Peter J. Gomes Chapel on Oct. 25 as hundreds of friends and colleagues of the late preacher and teacher gathered to remember him in words and song.

The Rev. Jonathan Walton, Peter Gomes’ successor as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, delivers the sermon at the service of naming the Gomes Chapel. Photo: Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Thoughtfully programmed, the 90-minute chapel service painted a picture of the complex and beloved Gomes, one of the brightest lights in the constellation of �ֲ���ý alumni. From the invocation by Bill Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain at �ֲ���ý, to the benediction by Emily Wright-Magoon, associate multifaith chaplain, the service established Gomes’ personal and intellectual ties to �ֲ���ý, the college that he credited as a formative force in his life.

Ultimately, in the sermon of the Rev. Jonathan L. Walton, Gomes’ successor as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, the event situated Gomes and �ֲ���ý in a greater moral landscape illuminated by faith, tenacity and hope.

“He relished this college, he cherished this chapel.”

And all this in a setting in which Gomes would likely have found much delight. “He relished this college. He cherished this chapel,” as one of the speakers, Carl Benton Straub, professor emeritus of religion and Clark A. Griffith Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, told the crowd.

Just days before the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the building, its stone walls were warmed by the presence of hundreds of people steeped in deep feeling for its namesake, ornamented by pomp and spectacle, and bathed in music from Bach to Paganini to Gomes’ Harvard friend Carson Cooman.

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In timing and content, the service also served as prelude to the much-anticipated inauguration of A. Clayton Spencer as �ֲ���ý’ eighth president on Oct. 26. �ֲ���ý trustees, active and retired, were on hand for the naming, as were three of Spencer’s predecessors as �ֲ���ý president: Donald Harward, Elaine Hansen and Nancy Cable, whose term as interim president directly preceded Spencer’s.

A handful of the delegates who will represent different educational institutions at Spencer’s installation were also in attendance. And the service highlighted the �ֲ���ý-Harvard bond embodied by Gomes and now by �ֲ���ý’ new president, who served Harvard for 15 years, most recently as vice president for policy. In addition to Walton, that little school down the road in Cambridge also sent the Rev. Wendel W. Meyer, associate minister for administration in The Memorial Church to �ֲ���ý to speak.

Also among the Harvard contingent was violinist Ryu Goto, Harvard ’11, a Deutsche Grammophon recording artist whose virtuosic rendition of a work by Paganini seemed to capture in sound the diverse dimensions of Gomes’ character.

Courage, intelligence, delight, generosity, and humility.

If Straub provided the closest focus on Gomes’ time at �ֲ���ý, it was Meyer who gave us the closest analysis of his character. The eloquent Meyer cited five qualities that he associates with his former colleague: courage, intelligence, delight, generosity, and humility — and founded on and enabled by a profound Christian faith.

The scripture reading for the service was Hebrews 12:1, which exhorts the reader to cast off impediments and run before the eyes of a “cloud of witnesses” who have made that same journey.

In his sermon, Walton built a long and masterful rhetorical arc from his relationship with President Spencer, through past �ֲ���ý presidents and other central figures, to the inspirational story of injured Olympic runner Derek Redmond hobbling across the finish line with his father by his side — and finally brought it home by reminding his listeners of the lesson from Ecclesiastes that the race is not given to the swift nor the strong, but to him or her who endures to the end.

A conception of God’s beauty as expressed in the material world is a theme of items to be offered at auction from the collection of the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes ’65, at noon Saturday, March 24.

The dining room at Oceanside, the home of Peter Gomes '65 in his hometown of Plymouth, Mass.

The sale of the Gomes collection has been entrusted to of Dedham, Mass.

The 550-lot collection features a discerning array of 18th- and 19th-century American and English art, books and furniture from Gomes’ Harvard residence, Sparks House, and from Oceanside, his home in Plymouth, Mass.

Gomes, who died Feb. 28, 2011, was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard. He was a famous preacher, bestselling author and beloved member of the Harvard, Plymouth and �ֲ���ý communities.

“Making a place for me in my times.”

A passionate collector and historic preservationist who embraced the past as a touchstone for today, Gomes was a man who “cared about history in a way that was quite intimate,” said his Harvard faculty colleague Diana Eck last year.

In 1997, he explained to House and Garden magazine that collecting historical items was not about “making a place for the ages” but instead “a place for me in my times.”

Peter Gomes '65 used this early 19th-century silver tea service to offer his famous Wednesday afternoon teas at Sparks House.

From a personal and theological perspective, he continued, “I do believe that God is the author of beauty. It is not beauty that distracts us from the love of God. It is beauty that affirms the presence of God. This [collecting] is not the worship of the material. This is using the gifts of God for the people of God.”

“That sentiment, about seeing God’s beauty and about appreciating the minutiae of God’s work, is straight out of the Renaissance,” observes Nancy Carlisle ’77, senior curator of collections at Historic New England, the region’s venerable historic preservation and heritage organization. In 2005, she curated and wrote the catalog for Historic New England’s acclaimed Cherished Possessions exhibition and is the author of the book America’s Kitchens.

Grounded in times and places of which Gomes was famously fond, the collection is hardly modern and hardly eclectic — but that does not mean he was a narrow collector, Carlisle says.

“One type of collector might dogmatically recreate an 18th-century period room at its most symmetrical and high style,” Carlisle says. “But I don’t think that was Peter Gomes.”

Rather, suggests Carlisle, the Gomes collection reflects his “rootedness.” He surrounded himself with beautiful and historic things that “anchored him in the world in which he grew up and lived. What he collected he deeply appreciated both spiritually and intellectually.

Seen here is Peter Gomes' living room at his Harvard residence, Sparks House.

“There are people who live in their heads and collect in their heads. But through the items he collected, Gomes was deeply invested in beauty and comfort and the world around him.”

There is, for example, Lot 110, an early 19th-century silver tea service by Lewis & Smith of Philadelphia, which Gomes used during his famous Wednesday afternoon teas at Sparks House. The gatherings hosted by Gomes, The Harvard Crimson wrote, were among the “hidden gems of Harvard life…[offering] students an opportunity to mingle with the university’s most colorful luminaries and eccentrics.”

Items from Oceanside include a George III inlaid mahogany secretary bookcase; a 19th-century English School portrait of a gentleman reading New Monthly Magazine; and an extensive collection of Chinese export porcelain and Canton blue and white porcelain.

In both residences, the Gomes collection boasts a large selection of English School and American School ancestral portraits and landscapes; 18th- and 19th-century English engravings of historical, theological and royal subjects; books focusing on similar themes; and numerous decorations, mirrors, chandeliers and lighting, garden furniture and statuary.

This fall, �ֲ���ý will celebrate the naming of the college chapel in memory of Peter Gomes. A former �ֲ���ý trustee and recipient of the Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, the college’s highest honor, Gomes included �ֲ���ý as one of the beneficiaries of his estate.

The auction exhibition opens March 21 and continues until the auction begins at noon March 24. Grogan and Co. is located at 22 Harris St., Dedham, Mass.