Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations were kicked off this past week with the 25th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Candlelight Vigil Procession hosted by Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternerity, Inc. (seen below) and Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou and singer-songwriter Jay-Marie Hill hosted by the Office of Institutional Diversity & Equity.
Rev. Sekou encouraged dialogue throughout the evening, directing the audience to engage and resist ahistorical accounts of King’s legacy:
“Martin Luther King was not popular during his lifetime,” he said. A majority at the time believed King’s actions were hurting, not helping, the causes he fought for—the same critique, Sekou said, that is currently being leveled against Black Lives Matter activists.
“People will say, when young people shut bridges down, and shut highways down, in terms of browbeating them, they would say Martin Luther King wouldn’t shut a bridge down,” he said. “But there was a movie, Selma”—about King’s 1965 voting rights march—“that’s all about a bridge being shut down.”
The full calender for the remaining MLK celebration events can be found here. The events will be concluded with a screening of the Academy Award nominated film Moonlight, whose trailer can be seen here.