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This year, Dartmouth’s series of events celebrating
the life and work of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
will focus on the theme (In)Visible Identities: The King Legacy and the Class
Divide. Marian Wright Edelman, longtime civil rights advocate and founder and
president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), will deliver this year’s
keynote address. The celebration will begin on Sunday, Jan. 20, and continue
through Friday, Feb.1. Most programs are free and open to the public.
Civil rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman is the keynote speaker for this
year’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebration.
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Edelman’s speech is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 21, which is Martin
Luther King Jr. Day, in Spaulding Auditorium, Hopkins Center. Edelman was
the first black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi bar and, as a leader
with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she served as counsel for
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign after his assassination. She
founded the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s to apply pressure on the
federal government to help disadvantaged children and to coordinate nationwide
activities benefitting children. Tickets to her address are free and will be
available beginning Jan. 15 for Dartmouth students, staff, and faculty
(Dartmouth ID required) and on Jan. 17 for the general public. Tickets are
limited to two per person and ticket holders must be in their seats by 6:45
p.m., after which empty seats become available to those without tickets.
A multimedia presentation of the speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at
Dartmouth on May 23, 1962, will run continuously from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on
Monday, Jan. 21, in 105 Dartmouth Hall. Other highlights of the two-week-long
program include panel discussions, lectures, film screenings, a candlelight
vigil, and performances.
The College’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee is headed by
Giavanna Munafo, associate director for training and educational programs in
the Office of Institutional Diversity
& Equity, and Nelson Armstrong ’71, special assistant to the president.
“The symbols or markers of class in popular culture reduce complex realities
about money and access to simplistic equations,” says Munafo. “Too often class
is virtually left out of analyses of diversity and difference—both in student
culture and in our classrooms and co-curricular programs and efforts, at least
until very recently. People just don’t talk about it that much, yet, at the
same time, we all know class shapes our lives and is, in that sense, very
visible. King’s desire to organize a Poor Peoples Campaign and his growing
attention to issues of poverty is an aspect of his legacy we have not
highlighted in past celebrations, so it is important to us to make that
connection this year.”
The celebration concludes with the presentation of Dartmouth’s annual Social
Justice Awards on Friday, Feb. 1, at 5 p.m. in Collis Common Ground. Those to
be honored this year are:
- Stephen Atwood ’68, DMS ’70, UNICEF’s regional advisor for
health and nutrition in East Asia and the Pacific. In 2005 and 2006, he served
as UNICEF director of emergency operations in Banda Aceh, coordinating massive
public health and recovery operations in the wake of the Pacific tsunami.
- Allison Barlow ’86, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins
Center for American Indian Health. She has also been a longtime active board
member with the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter.
- Renai Rodney ’99, assistant United States attorney for the
northern district of Illinois. She previously worked as an Equal Justice Works
fellow, and she is co-founder of Voices International, a mentoring project for
adolescent girls.
- Anne Sosin ’02, founder and director of Haiti Rights
Vision, which focuses on women’s rights, violence against women, health as a
human right, and general human rights issues in Haiti.
- Dartmouth Ends Hunger, which works to bring issues of
world poverty to the forefront through interactive campus events.
- MEDLIFE, which works with families in poor communities to
improve their access to medicine, education, and community development.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was a key figure in the American Civil
Rights Movement of the 1960s, from his leadership of the Montgomery, Ala., bus
boycott in 1955–56 to the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., in 1963. As
an advocate of an unyielding but nonviolent campaign for change, he won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968. In
1983, Congress designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day to be observed on the
third Monday in January, a day that falls on or is near King’s birthday.
By GENEVIEVE HAAS
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