Duke Community 'Comes to the Table' to Celebrate MLK
A look back at the 2007 MLK Week
Over the course the Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday celebration, Duke students, faculty and guests proposed applications of King's legacy to today's world under the commemoration theme of "Come to the Table." (Watch the slideshow.)
Ambassador Andrew Young, one of King's top deputies, said in his address Sunday, "Martin Luther King's notion of ending racism and poverty and war is still very, very relevant.
"It would have helped if our president had kind of understood that affirmative action is a necessary part of that -- that you can't give benefits to one group of people and not protect the benefits of the other," Young said. "If we had gone into Iraq differently, and then when got there respected the differences and insecurities of Kurd and Sunni and Shia, and if we had a constitution that protected their minority rights, we might have avoided significant bloodshed." For more on Young's speech, click here.
The week of events provided several opportunities for discussion and activities related to themes that were central to King's -- and Young's -- work. One event brought together Duke and N.C. Central students to help fight hunger.
In other MLK events:
A Freedom School program on affirmative action brought about a vibrant debate, held mostly between senior Stephen Miller and law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. More than 100 people attended the session.
Miller argued affirmative action in elite university admissions benefits mostly middle class black students who have generally not suffered severe discrimination and would otherwise be accepted at respected, second-tier colleges. The result of affirmative action, he said, is a higher college dropout rate among blacks and a questioning of the qualifications of black students.
"You're talking about blatant discrimination [against whites and Asians] -- . It's terrible; it's sad," he said. "There are far more important problems in the black community that white liberals are afraid to talk about," including drug abuse, crime and fatherless families.
Arguing for affirmative action, Chemerinsky said it is a just response to past discrimination and is necessary to ensure racial diversity at top universities. Students admitted under affirmative action are qualified, he said, citing his experience with students in his law classes.
"Equality doesn't mean treating people the same," he said. "We have a long history of discrimination and we should do something about it."
Another Freedom School session on campus race relations centered on voluntary segregation by race and drew an audience of more than 100 people.
Senior Malik Burnett said he saw a double standard in how the term "self segregation" is used at Duke. While a group of black students sitting together are said to be self segregating, he said, "no one's going to walk up to you [if you are white] and say, ‘Why are you self-segregating? Why are all your friends sitting together?'"
To counter the natural inclination to group by race, Burnett proposed a "Diversity 20" course that, similar to "Writing 20," would be mandatory for freshmen.
"If we as a university boast that we have a diverse student body, then it is incumbent on the university to ensure that they interact," he said. "This would be something that makes [intercultural exchanges] much more than circumstantial, but institutional."
Miller, sitting on his second panel of the day, kept the discussion lively. Responding to a charge of racial basis among faculty, he said, "Maybe we should just hire more Republicans. Then we wouldn't have that problem."
At the discussion of campus life sponsored by the Campus Culture Life, panelists discussed ways of "engaging difference."
Other Freedom School sessions focused on the effect of Duke's expansion of surrounding neighborhoods; white privilege; King's complex life decisions; how faith communities worked together in the civil rights movement; educating girls in Kenya; public schooling; and policies to facilitate the rebuilding of New Orleans.
After sitting in on the affirmative action session, senior LaTashia Hicks said she felt some of her peers do not appreciate the circumstances like hers, which include growing up in a poor family and having a friend killed on her block over Christmas vacation.
"I may have gotten into Duke because of affirmative action -- maybe that's the truth, maybe it's not," Hicks said. "But, affirmative action is not making my A's, affirmative action is not making my B's, affirmative action is not keeping me at Duke -- . It's not what makes me pre-med; it's not what makes me a scientist about to be published on a major publication doing biology and breast cancer research."
Other students were ready with opinions about affirmative action and campus race relations.
"I'd actually heard a characterization of affirmative action as an attempt to diffuse knowledge, public education, to as much of the population as possible," senior Karthik Balasubramanian said. "That's the side of the debate I fall into."
"I probably agreed with someone such as Professor [Michael] Munger [who spoke in opposition to affirmative action], but -- we came at that result from different angles," said Richard Spencer, a history graduate student. "There was definitely blood on the floor afterwards, so that was certainly good."
"Someone commented that they're tired of these race relations forums and stuff like that, but to me it seems like it is an incredibly important thing to do," said Rob Stephens, a UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore and Robertson Scholar at Duke this semester. "The theme of the week is ‘Come to the Table' -- to keep on coming back and discussing issues even if some things are said again."
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A Jan. 11 breakfast banquet for Facilities Management Department employees on featured King's "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech.
The speech was given in 1967 in Atlanta to members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In it, King proposes spending $20 billion a year to guarantee a minimum income for every American, saying, "If our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth."
Joe Jackson, an organizer of the event and the assistant director for grounds and sanitation, said the speech was chosen because it has a message for "workers to pull together to realize their power and assert themselves in the right way."
After listening to the speech, university house keeper Noah Langley took one of the printed copies of the speech made available. He said he was going to make copies of it for the youth group he works with at the West End Community Center.
One way an average person can apply King's message today is, "in the simplest form, even saying hello to someone you don't know," Langley said. "Something small like that could help out on the larger scale."
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The "Waiting for Martin" play written, choreographed and directed by Walltown Children's Theatre played to a packed Reynolds Theater on Jan. 15.
The play's central characters are three teenage characters living under a railroad bridge who hear about the Civil Rights movement. In the final scene, the teenagers learn of King's assassination. The character Solomon heads off to the white section of town unafraid "because God sent the great, great Dr. Martin Luther King."
After seeing the play Durham resident Rashid Curtis said, "It's a hard subject, but I think they handled it well," considering "the violence and the challenges of the era, especially when you have audiences with children."
"I'm glad my daughter was here with me -- she's 14 -- to hear what went on in her history," said Durham resident Ivy Williams.
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Also on Jan. 15, actress Nancy Giles poked fun at relations between races, recounting her attempts to navigate life as a black woman bouncing between white and black communities in her career and education.
Speaking to an audience of about 170 people, Giles said her first line in her first movie was, as a policewoman receiving an order at a restaurant, "I be having those." Riffing on the absurdity of her policewoman character using jive, she dramatized how she ever so gently suggested her line be changed to, "Those are mine."
"I never liked the term ‘African American,'" Giles said, noting that white people rarely refer to their ancestry in terms of an entire continent -- "European American."
"I believe we should be called by what we really are: ‘Kidnapped Americans,'" she said.
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The audience of about 75 at a presentation last Friday by documentary filmmaker Danté James shouted, "More!" when James screened clips from his PBS show on the late African-American classical singer Marian Anderson.
James showed clips from four other of his films on aspects of American history: "This Far By Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys," "America's War on Poverty," "The Great Depression" and "Slavery and the Making of America."
He said his goal in documentaries is "to find the humanity within the American people," something consistent with King's call to "make a career of humanity."
James gave examples of showing the humanity in his subjects by the choices he made in producing "Slavery."
"I had major problems calling them ‘slaves,'" James said. "To me they were human beings, enslaved."
Another choice James made was depicting slaves with full body shots of actors, instead of symbols like shackled hands or feet. "We wanted the audience to respect the enslaved as the full fledged humans that they were," he said.
After the presentation, Gloria Ayee, a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies student, said, "It brought a new dimension to many stories we already know."
Marian Anderson's story, however, was new to Ayee. "With Marian Anderson, [I was struck by] just the power of the African-American spirit to overcome adversity."
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Dr. Victor Dzau, chancellor for health affairs, discussed "Duke's Place in the World: A Local Response to Global Health Equity," at a Jan. 16 luncheon as part of Martin Luther King commemoration events on the medical campus.
A world in which 4 billion people live in poverty and a nation where 45 million have no health insurance, "is a very significant problem that we all need to deal with," Dzau said. Duke's role must be to improve health care access for everyone, provide the same levels of care for everyone it serves and continue to diversify its workforce.
Dzau said he was proud that the student body of Duke's medical school is now 20 percent black and Hispanic, while the school is considered the most difficult medical school in the country to get into. "But I recognize that we have a lot more work to do."
"Global is local and international," Dzau said. "It's also about Durham; it's about North Carolina."
(Karl Bates contributed to this story)