Harker’s third annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration, which began earlier that week with the community’s recognition of the Day of Service, culminated on Friday night with a special Harker Speaker Series event featuring Dr. Walter D. Greason, a historian, author and scholar of Afrofuturist design.
The night’s program started with a special performance by pianist, composer, bandleader and activist Kev Choice, accompanied by members of Harker’s upper school orchestra and jazz band. The group performed Choice’s original pieces “MacArthur’s Mood,” which describes a young man’s emotional state while walking through his hometown, and “Movements,” on which Choice performed as a rapper.
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Greason began with a reflection on recent events in his home state of Minnesota, where thousands of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed, making warrantless arrests and incarcerations, prompting anger from the city’s residents, which reached a fever pitch after 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Widely circulated video of the killing appeared to show Good, who had been stopped in the middle of the street by ICE agents, turning toward traffic in an effort to leave the scene when Ross fired three shots into Good’s vehicle. In response, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took part in a protest and general strike on Friday, the same day of Greason’s appearance.
“And so these actions have exceeded…the confrontations that we have all seen in historic footage about the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the March from Selma to Montgomery, the horrendous attacks with fire hoses and dogs to attempt to suppress even small children who were marching in support of their rights,” he said. “We are living through an amplified version of what Dr. King suffered and died for.”
For his survey of Dr. King’s work, Greason started in 1950 in New Jersey, years before many of the well-known events of King’s work in the civil rights movement. While a student at a Camden seminary, King and a group of friends decided to stage a sit-in at Mary’s Café, which had refused to serve Black patrons. A municipal court found that the café had been in violation of an anti-discrimination statute. This action, Greason said, set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the passing of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s, which led to greater economic prosperity for Black Americans.
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He also made special mention of the work of Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, “who we do not celebrate enough when it comes to this holiday every year,” he said. “Coretta stood with Martin every step of the way, talking with him about every piece of strategy, how to balance the different and competing interests that they had as they put the movement together.”
Following Dr. King’s assassination, Coretta set about to elevate his life and work, establishing him as a saintly figure in American history.
“This happens very rarely in our society that, essentially, we elevate a secular saint,” Greason said. As with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King’s life, work and untimely death created a rare moment in which American society “sets a new standard to say, the horror of this violence, taking one of the best people we know, must be commemorated, must be understood to change our public discourse so that we don’t repeat these errors.”
This memory is further preserved in the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year, which was the result of a campaign popularized by singer Stevie Wonder, who was asked by Coretta to write the song “Happy Birthday” for the campaign, giving it enough momentum to bring the issue to Congress, resulting in “the only holiday about an average everyday citizen, someone who was not elected to public office, that was dedicated to us understanding and giving our lives to service and citizenship and building up the ways that we actually create the King idea of beloved community,” Greason said.
Greason was adamant about the importance of community, recognizing not only its manifestation in Minnesota but also at Harker.
“This place is a love of community,” he said. “And I can say that with great certainty because I’ve spent the last three days here, reading and talking with so many of your classmates and teachers,” he added, noting also “the way that the entire staff makes the place come together.”
The full video of Greason’s speech, including the question-and-answer session with both him and Kev Choice, will be made available to view online later this week.
