Dream Hope & Remembrance

Community and campus honors MLK’s legacy

Noelle Brooks/ Staff Photographer

Community members and students show their support for equality and unity on MLK day. Marchers walked from Hurley Park to Flagg Chapel to experience the activism of the Civil Rights era.

Nearly five decades after his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy continues with a three-day event titled “Connecting the Past, Present and Future,” with a focus on connecting Georgia College students and members of the Milledgeville community.

“We feel this will bridge the gap between the college and the community and improve the college’s reputation with the community,” Emmanuel Little, the Georgia College Cultural Center’s diversity retention and training coordinator said. “We hope to do this mainly by just fostering collaboration.”

To this end,  the event was changed to span three days, Jan. 14  to 16, rather than one, providing the opportunity for people to participate and still enjoy their holiday. There has also been the addition of a food drive ending Jan. 31, and the donations collected support Café Central, Baldwin County’s only soup kitchen. The Department of Equity and Diversity approached Auxiliary Services about managing the food drive and Little believes this sort of outreach reflects the core of King’s message of unity.

“I want to eliminate those invisible barriers,” Little said. “It’s a challenge, but we chip away at it one activity at a time.”

Joshua Braswell, a senior rhetoric major and one of the student readers of King’s speeches during the march on Monday, agreed that unity is a key part of King’s message.

“It’s a chance for me to learn about my history as an African American male,” Braswell said. “And I get to learn how it was to live in the time of King and how much privilege I have.”

Willie King, a retired Vietnam veteran, has a vivid memory of this era, struggling much of his life to simply finish his bachelor’s degree in business. King described growing up in the early ’50s strapped to his mother and grandmother as they picked cotton in the fields, often weighing their bags with rocks hoping to get a little extra money for their harvest. There were no unions or minimum-wage laws to protect workers’ rights, and the compensation they received was often barely enough to support their families.

“Black people didn’t have the voice

they have now,” Willie King said. “You had black folks who had nerve, that would stand up for their rights, but they’d cut them down.”

This sort of adversity prevented Willie King from finishing his degree at Georgia College. Willie King explained that the white school administrators at the time were against his success and after four years of struggling and failing classes, Willie King dropped out. Although he ended his education at the time, he most recently filled out an application to attend Georgia College again. He has not started back yet, but plans to pursue his initial goal.

“I started my business degree and I want to finish it,” he said. “I never did give up my dream.”

Willie King attributed his ability to pursue this dream to the great strides that have been made since Martin Luther King’s time, and this opportunity for education is something Braswell has appreciated from an early age.

“I had a grandmother who was at the tail end of the cotton picking era and had to drop out of middle school” Braswell said. “So she always encouraged me to pursue an education, and be the best I can be.”

The excerpt that Braswell chose to read from Martin Luther King Jr. emphasizes the need to vote and get involved, a sentiment that he hopes will influence his fellow students.

“It’s a call to action, especially for those going out into the world,” Braswell said. “Not only to be the best doctor, lawyer, educator you want to be, but to do it upholding MLK’s dream, to maintain equality…because we’re all one in the same.”

Posted by Noelle Brooks on Jan 19 2012. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.