Dayton to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. with students’ work, march, rally

Dr. Martin Luther King

When Trotwood-Madison High School student Jaboris Person sat down to write an essay on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she wasn’t sure what was going to come out.

“But as soon as I started typing, it just started flowing,” said Person, who won first place and a $3,600 scholarship to the University of Dayton in the 25th Annual MLK Scholarship Contest.

Margaret Peters, adjunct professor at Sinclair Community College and chair of the Dayton-area Martin Luther King School Program, said the essays enable young students to connect King’s work with existing social issues such as racism, war and homelessness.

“Analyzing an issue in Dr. Vincent Harding’s ‘Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Us in Today’s World’ really puts him in a different light, and they can see other problems that we’re dealing with today with which he would still be concerned,” Peters said.

In her essay, Person raised concerns that many youths don’t appreciate King’s efforts.

“Young people of today, including the people of my generation and local community, have become ignorant not only about the hard work Dr. King accomplished, but also about the hard work that many others like him contributed,” she wrote.

Anissa Williams, a Stivers School for the Arts student whose essay helped her win a $3,200 scholarship to Wright State University, wrote that many people remember King only for his civil-rights efforts.

“Dr. King was not only a man who worked toward equality for blacks, but also a man who stood up for what he believed in when it came to social, political, economic and environmental problems,” Williams wrote.

The contest is part of Dayton’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Program, which also features an awards ceremony for the students, an interfaith prayer breakfast, an evening banquet and a march and rally.

King–a clergyman, activist and prominent leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement–received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end racial discrimination. He was assassinated in 1968. In 1986, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday.

This year’s themes for the Dayton celebration are civil and voting rights, and human rights. The human-rights theme comes from King’s writings in which he stated that while blacks and whites, easterners and westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Hindus inherited a “great world house,” the groups were separated by ideas, culture and interests.

The Jan. 13 prayer breakfast will feature Rev. Sylvester Walker, pastor at St. Luke Baptist Church and executive secretary of the Ohio Baptist General Convention. Walker once worked at the United Nations, and his preaching has taken him around the world. The breakfast, at the Mandalay Banquet Center, begins at 7:30 a.m.

The awards ceremony for Jaboris, Anissa and the other students will be held that same day at 7 p.m. at Thurgood Marshall High School.

The Jan. 16 march will begin at 11 a.m. at Welcome Stadium and culminate with a rally in the Dayton Convention Center. Following afternoon workshops, the convention center will also play host to the banquet, which begins at 6 p.m. The speaker will be Dr. Lewis O. Brogdon, director of Black Church Studies at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

The workshops, which begin at 1 p.m., include several offered by Wright State. They are titled the MLK Freedom Toolkit and are designed to help people struggling in the current economy. Topics include healthy eating on a budget, responsible financial planning, how to apply for aid and tips on resume writing and job interviewing.

The Wright State Black Student Union, NAACP and other student groups have actively supported Dayton’s MLK celebration for many years by providing volunteers, marching and attending the downtown rally.

On Jan. 17, Wright State will present the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Service Awards to Joan Chappelle, Tony Ortiz, Sharon Lynette Jones, Galen Crawford and Aaron Stokes. The ceremony will begin at 6 p.m. in the Student Union Apollo Room.

And on Jan. 18, Wright State will hold its First Annual MLK Unity March and Rally. Participants will begin the march at 12:15 p.m. at five different campus locations and converge for the rally.

The participants will march in silence to a common destination, where they will hear from members of the community. The goal is to bring solution-oriented awareness to ways in which valuing diversity and inclusion may work to dismantle and undermine oppression and discrimination.