Pictured above: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Mount Holyoke College on October 20, 1963. Image courtesy of the MHC Archives.
By Soleil Doering ’24
Staff Writer
Mount Holyoke continued its second annual Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King Week of Racial Justice and Reconciliation with a series of events and virtual talks.
On Jan. 24, Mount Holyoke alumna Quanita Haley ’12 gave a sermon entitled “Let Justice Roll Down: A Christian Service in Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
On Monday, Jan. 25, Mount Holyoke Reference and Digital Projects Archivist Micha Broadnax facilitated a conversation between interim Dean of Faculty Dorothy Mosby and Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Kijua Sanders-McMurtry titled “Confronting Our Racial Past” through a discussion of the books “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson and “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi. The three speakers participated in a joint conversation about each book’s analysis of America’s historically racist structures and ideals. They explored how the themes of these books can teach readers about race relations today.
Maryam Ware ’22, a student fellow at the Weissman Center for Leadership, introduced Thursday’s public lecture, “The Half-Life of Freedom: Race and Justice in America Today” with Dr. Jelani Cobb. Cobb is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a speaker on race, history, politics and culture in America. He also created the PBS documentary “Policing the Police.”
Cobb talked about Martin Luther King Jr.’s discussion of “white backlash” as a continuation of the historical prejudices against the Black person in his last book, “Where Do We Go from Here?”
“We see this backlash, and it has animated a great deal of what we have seen in the past five years,” Cobb said. Cobb also spoke about his coverage of the 2015 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.
“One of the things that was notable to me at the time was the extent to which it echoed with the resounding terms of history,” he said. “[Considering that it] happen[ed] [on] the 150th anniversary year of the end of the Civil War and on the 100th anniversary of the release of the film ‘Birth of a Nation.’”
Ware thought Cobb’s lecture brought necessary insight to understanding U.S. history. “History is paramount to understanding the present,” Ware said. “For example, the history of policing can correlate to the issues we are having with police brutality today.”
Sanders-McMurtry brought up the common issue of a lack of motivation or discouragement among students to continue in the work of racial healing when being consistently opposed.
“The people who last [in this work] have very realistic perspectives,” Cobb said. “It took us a very long time to get these problems, and it will take us a very long time to get out of them. So I think I’ve just tried to adopt the attitude of a marathon runner.”
Gaby Alverez ’24 said she could relate to this feeling of discouragement. “Coming from an immigrant family into the Mount Holyoke environment, where I’m alongside peers who are in a higher social class, it’s easy to feel inferior,” she said. “But hearing what Cobb said about setting realistic goals gives me a different perspective.”
The event closed with the question: “What is wrong with the soul of America?”
Cobb responded by comparing American society to an “insecure person that can only talk about its good attributes, but not its areas that need improvement. And because we’ve accepted this idea of ourselves as exceptional, we have no room to actually grow.”
“As a nation, we need to grow and move forward, and the only way we can do that is to dissect the past, admit the wrongs and create new laws, new policies and a new culture where the wrongs are rewritten into spiritual righteousness,” Ware said.
On Friday, the program of events closed out with a commemoration of the radical activism of Coretta Scott King. Sanders-McMurtry began the event with a presentation on Coretta Scott King’s evolution as an activist in her own right. She said that King “countered the narrative of symbolism” surrounding her status as a widow and discussed King’s rejection of being seen solely as the widow to Martin Luther King Jr.
The event focused on King’s work as an activist for not only racial justice but also immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ issues and food justice. Although King was often criticized by Black male leaders in the Christian community, she continued to fight for the civil liberties of all people.
To speak more on food justice, Mount Holyoke invited organizer, activist and researcher Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Syracuse University. Valdez coordinates the advocacy efforts of the New York Immigration Coalition’s members and partner organizations around issues of deportation, workers’ rights and access to services.
Valdez discussed farmworkers’ lack of workers’ rights and the history of racist colonialism within the food industry. “This industry is what it is because it was built on the backs of people of color,” she said.
“The civil rights movement changed not only America but the world,” Ware said. “And if we study the history of it, it may lead to solutions and new revelations on what we should all be doing moving forward.”