In separate speeches during this year’s event held on Jan. 13, a current student and an alumnus — Daryl Brown ’09 and Rev. Kenric Austin Prescott ’73 — told a rapt audience in a packed room in the Hogan Campus Center that King’s dream of racial equality has not been fully realized, and that students must be willing and ready to fight the injustices of the world.
Brown related how just weeks earlier he discovered his family’s personal connection to the slain civil rights leader.
“My grandmother tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘June 19, 1958,’ ” said the political science and Spanish double major from Stone Mountain, Ga. “She could tell by the puzzled look on my face that I could not understand the significance of this date. My grandmother then explained that this was the day my great grandparents hosted Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy for dinner in Omaha, Nebraska.”
The civil rights leaders were in Omaha attending the National Baptist Sunday School Conference, Brown explained. Local preachers brought them to his great grandparents’ house for a good meal.
“This specific dinner happened more than 50 years ago, but my grandmother remembers it like it was yesterday,” he said.
Brown referenced King’s 1957 speech “Give Us the Ballot” in which the activist said “if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing can be more Christian.”
He added: “Dr. King’s dream is a dream of many dreams, encompassing generations of success and progress for every race and community.”
Brown underscored the fact that Barack Obama’s election to the highest office in America does not mean that King’s dream is complete.
Continuing that theme, Prescott, pastor-teacher of Union Baptist Church of Hartford, Conn., told the emerging leaders “you need to keep reminding yourself that the dream has not been fulfilled.”
Racism, he asserted, is alive and well, albeit in a concealed fashion. As a freshman at Holy Cross in 1969, Rev. Prescott recalled walking on Southbridge Street, near the bottom of College Hill, with a fellow black student, when a young boy, who he guesses must have been 6 or 7 years old, shouted a racial epithet.
Events like that are rare nowadays, he said, but only because people know they can land in hot water if caught. Instead, “they’re underground.”
Rev. Prescott concluded by reminding the audience that hate grows when people are alienated from each other. His advice to students who aspire to leadership positions: befriend strangers to continue the fight against hate.
Pictured: Daryl Brown '09
