Still more work to do

MLK’s words help city leaders look to road ahead

Serghino René

Gov. Deval Patrick led a celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by calling for a renewed commitment to bridging racial divides and creating a more just society.

Patrick was sharply critical of the U.S. Supreme Court during his speech before hundreds of people gathered at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

The nation’s highest court is now deliberating two cases involving school desegregation that legal analysts suggest could mark the end one of the crowning legal achievements of the civil rights movement — Brown v Board of Education.

“The United States Supreme Court is on the brink of rationalizing justice right out of the law,” Patrick said. “Their pattern seems to be a sort of pious acknowledgement of the existence of discrimination and then condemnation of any effort to do anything about it ... There’s work left to do.”

Patrick’s remarks underscored a theme in speeches delivered on King’s birthday, both in Boston and across the country, about the unfinished work left remaining in the civil rights movement.

“Race relations is the only major social ill we’re facing in this country that we seem to be seriously considering curing by denial, as if declaring ourselves colorblind in law will make us colorblind in fact,” Patrick said, repeating a mantra of “We have much work to do.”

The governor said the civil rights movement that King led has grown to include ethnic and racial groups other than blacks. He pointedly said it includes gays and lesbians, a notion that has been rejected by some black activists.

“The struggles of others have taken their rightful place over the years alongside the struggles of black people,” Patrick told a capacity crowd inside Faneuil Hall earlier on Monday.

Patrick indicated his concern over an initiative petition to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage.

“Whether you support gay marriage or not, and I know views on this are very strong, we are about to take the radical step of using a petition initiative to defeat basic rights,” he said. “The use of the petition process to insert discrimination into the Constitution and limit freedoms is unprecedented.”

Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., also raised the Supreme Court’s deliberations in his remarks at the convention center.

“We thought we’d resolved the problem in the 1950s of separate and unequal ... with Brown v. Board of Education,” Kerry said. “Here we are in 2006, and we’re living not with the question of separate and equal, we’re living with a school system that is institutionalized across the nation that is separate and unequal — unacceptable.”

At Northeastern University, Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, delivered the keynote address and talked about the power of King’s message.

“We are here to celebrate what has already been started,” she said. “The challenge he left for all of us is a challenge we still face today.”

Evers-Williams remembered how Coretta Scott King worked tirelessly to see that her late husband had a day for Americans to remember his legacy.

She brought some comic relief to the floor when she said, “When I opened the paper one day and saw ‘Martin Luther King Holiday Sale,’ that’s when I realized that King’s day was as American as apple pie!”

At one point, she rhetorically asked the audience what they thought King’s greatest concern would be today. Evers-Williams chose apathy, saying there is too much of it in today’s society.

“The apathy we find among us is a sore in our society,” she said. “People say, ‘My one vote doesn’t matter, I’m about me and getting my own,’ or, ‘The civil rights movement was then, this is now.’”

Evers-Williams took that moment to talk about the civil rights movement on a personal level, taking attendees on a personal journey and talking about the social struggle, the importance of achieving certain rights, and the evolution from being called nigger, to Negro, to black and ultimately, to African American, in the context of change.

“Those who use that word [the n-word] need a history lesson,” she said. “They don’t understand the nature of all of it. They don’t understand the price that has been paid to hopefully move us from that time when [King] stood and said, ‘I have a dream,’ to where we are today. Back then, those were words that made you fight.”

By the end, Evers-Williams made clear her view that all of humanity needs and should have the opportunity to move forward and contribute to society.

“As my grandchildren once said to me, ‘Well, tell me what it was like in your time,’” said Evers-Williams. “I find that kind of interesting and challenging, saying, ‘Come, let me share with you.’”

A similar convocation ceremony was held at Roxbury’s historic Twelfth Baptist Church, with the keynote address delivered by Dr. Dana Mohler-Faria, the first person of color to head Bridgewater State College and a recent appointee to Patrick’s Cabinet as an education adviser.

Quoting heavily from King’s words, Mohler-Faria gave his speech from the very pulpit King once gave his sermons during his days in Boston.

He opened up with startling statistics. Blacks with the same skill set and education still earn 10 to 20 percent less income than their white counterparts. The college dropout rate among blacks exceeds 20 percent, more than three times that of other populations. About 17 percent of blacks have college degrees, compared to 30 percent of the white population. One in five of black men will spend part of his life in prison, seven times the rate of white males. Blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but nearly half of the U.S. prison population.

“We are in tumultuous times and we have work we must do,” said Mohler-Faria. “We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. The strength of community and faith will help us rise above those statistics.”

Mohler-Faria encouraged listeners to be their own generators and motivators of change, and stressed the three ways to make that happen: through love of God, love of self and love for humanity and community.

“The church is a community,” said Mohler-Faria. “It’s a center where we have the opportunity to engage in the synergy of love, and Dr. King understood that.”

Mohler-Faria has taken his own words to heart. He followed a path of achievement, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school and go to college. Three decades and four degrees later, he continues to cite the work ethic and moral fabric of his late father, a construction worker, and his late mother, a laborer in the cranberry bogs of Wareham and in the factories of New Bedford.

His optimistic outlook on life is a credit to the Cape Verdean community in which he grew up. In addition to being the first person of color to lead Bridgewater State, Mohler-Faria is only the second Cape Verdean in the United States to be elected the president of a higher education institution.

“Those are the standards by which I hold myself up to each and every day,” he said.