Leon Tovey Emerald
Panel member Henry Alley (center) fields a question from the audience at Tuesday night’s “What Would MLK Say” event.
While Tuesday night’s “What Would MLK Say?” event was billed as a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s impact on the civil rights movement, the five-person panel quickly shifted the focus from the late civil rights leader to the need for a more complete understanding of the history behind the movement.
“History gets boiled down,” Assistant English Professor Jayna Brown said. “The story comes to us that one day there was a woman named Rosa Parks on a bus and she was too tired to give up her seat, and then all of a sudden things started happening and Martin Luther King came and helped.”
Brown, who works in the Ethnic Studies Program, told the nearly 50 people in attendance that the reality of the civil rights movement has been condensed by mainstream historians who have canonized King.
“We have to rethink history” she said. “Not of great men and wars, but of collective movements.”
Brown’s statement was echoed by the panel’s moderator, Assistant History Professor Martin Summers, who said the civil rights movement was “a movement of grassroots activism.”
The reason the movement was successful, Brown said, was because it had been built up over a period of years by a variety of groups, ranging from church congregations to tenants’ leagues with ties to the Communist Party.
Henry Alley, a professor in the Robert Donald Clark Honors College, drew parallels between the black civil rights movement and the gay rights movement — both of which are ongoing. Alley recalled seeing King give a speech in Seattle when he was in high school and being impressed by the nonviolent, but direct, action that was King’s trademark.
“Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream,” Alley said. “That anyone could walk down the street and not feel threatened.”
Audience members responded positively to the panel. Haden Woldu, co-director of the Black Student Union, addressed the issue of the ongoing struggle for equality and ended by asking “As a student of color, what can I do?”
Rebecca Roebig, a former University student and member of the group Justice Network Coalition, said that while she enjoyed the event, she thought the panel was mostly “preaching to the choir.
“I liked it, but I would’ve liked to see more dialogue,” she said. “The panel was agreeing about everything.”
E-mail higher education editor Leon Tovey at [email protected].