A panel of guest speakers at Thorne Auditorium in the Northwestern School of Law commemorated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a discussion about the future of the black civil rights movement.
The event was sponsored by the DREAM Committee of the Feinberg School of Medicine and NU Law.
The five-person panel, moderated by CNN political analyst and talk show host Carlos Watson, stressed the need for renewed energy and activism from all ranks of the progressive community, acknowledging both the lingering conflicts and the drastic changes from the days of Dr. King.
“In many ways the challenges of this generation, I think, are greater than earlier generations,” said Lawrence Marshall, NU professor of law and co-founder of the Center On Wrongful Convictions, noting that we don’t have the same “stark images of blatant, hideous racism” to motivate people to the streets.
“What we need is a way to stir the energy, without the stark images, that was stirred in the ’60s,” he added.
The panel addressed a wide swath of issues including health care and urban development, but focused primarily on the crisis of education and leadership in the black community.
Asked how she would rewrite Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for a contemporary audience, the editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter, Alicia Tate, said she would wish for leaders who wouldn’t end their careers as martyrs to their cause.
“In particular, in the black community, my dream would be that we don’t sacrifice any leaders, that we don’t have another leader that goes down the road that Dr. King did,” Tate said.
Tate added that she did not want Sen. Barack Obama to become a lone linchpin in the drive for black equality.
“I don’t want to see Barack Obama become the kind of leader that Dr. King was,” she said, “someone that we put all our hopes in, and when they are gone, the movement loses its steam. I think more of us are going to have to see ourselves in their same league.”
The panelists stressed the importance of individual action throughout the two-hour session.
“Instead of looking for the charismatic leader, we should ask ourselves, are we doing what we can do to contribute to this movement,” Marshall said.
Terri Johnson, a veteran public policy reform advocate, said that contrary to myth, Rosa Parks had not acted independently when she refused to relinquish her seat on a Birmingham bus to a white passenger. An ordinary citizen, she had been handpicked by an activist group to commit the act of civil disobedience.
Panelists sounded off on the various woes of an American education tilted in favor of the wealthy and agreed that equality in education would be the bedrock of an equal society.
Given the choice in the next 30 years of 15 black senators, 100 black or female CEOs in the Fortune 500, or a 90 percent graduation rate for black high school students, most of the panelists said they would choose the high graduation rate.
“Usually when something goes askew, it’s because somebody dropped out, dropped out of school,” said Chuck Smith, director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater.
Audience members were impressed by the panel’s quality of discourse and message.
“By far the best MLK event I’ve attended,” said Michael Blake, Medill ’04, “It wasn’t just inspiring. It was an event that gave you action items. The panelists gave us somewhere to go, and that’s exactly what Dr. King would want from us.”
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
