HSU holds virtual events to honor civil rights leader
Black Voters Matter co-founder calls to ‘radically reimagine’ society amid MLK celebrations
Humboldt State University held a virtual “MLK Day of Civic Engagement” on Monday morning to honor and celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The virtual event began with “A Day On, Not a Day Off,” a discussion with keynote speaker LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, Black Voters Matter Fund, and Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute.
Once on screen, Brown burst into song with “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” a folk song that became associated with the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
“It wasn't until I got older that I found out that that was a song that grew out of the movement,” Brown said. “What's interesting, and why I love to start singing songs and other freedom songs, is that the people that sung that song didn't necessarily have the government on their side, they didn't have a lot of political power, they didn't have a lot of resources. What they had is a particular belief and their own agency.”
In many ways, Brown said she is at the height of her career with a flourishing organization but she begged the question, “Are we really making a difference?”
“I've done voting rights work for 20-plus years of my life,” Brown said. “We knocked on more than two million doors. Being able to see some of the fruits of our labor in the presidential election, where we had record Black voter turnout. In Georgia where we were able to send two new senators to the Senate and to be able to engage Black voters, many who had not been voting before. While there's a part of me that's excited and I feel very proud and honored to do that work, there's also a side of me that has this question in the back of my head. The same question that Dr. King asked, ‘Am I integrating my people into a burning house?'”
After a year of protests and political upheaval, Brown asked her audience to consider their role in the present moment.
“What is most important right now is for us all to ask ourselves the same question, the same question that drove (Dr. King) to do the work that he needed,” she said. “The same question that he asked himself before he went to D.C., and gave his greatest speech ever during the
March on Washington. The same question that he asked himself before he went to bed the night before he was assassinated the next day.”
Brown called her audience to close their eyes and consider what the United States would look like without racism and without oppression.
“I do this exercise wherever I speak…What’s really interesting is 98% of the people in the room, no matter where I go, are unable to see anything,” she said. “I’m raising that not as a judgment, but as a wake-up call. The truth of the matter is, how will we ever create anything, how will we be able to create a nation without racism and without oppression when we cannot even visualize it?”
Brown cited King’s “three evils”: the evil of racism, the evil of poverty and the evil of war.
“Fundamentally, as long as we were literally steeped in a nation that those three values were the leading, prevailing values that moved and shaped how we operated and function in the world, that we would continue to go through the cycle of pain and destruction, of inequality and oppression,” Brown said. “And here we are in 2021… what are we faced with?”
Brown called her audience to “radically reimagine every system” and finished her discussion with questions from the audience. “What part do you think higher education plays in maintaining racist societies and what suggestions do you have for us to work on these issues together?” asked one audience member.
“These institutions have played a vital role in supporting a culture that prioritizes white comfort,” Brown said. “Let’s be honest, that’s just the truth. That it is all they’ve all been created in many ways to support and to facilitate systems that support and lend itself to a vision that was of seeing the world through the eyes of, particularly in this country, white land-owning men.”
Brown acknowledged the historical exclusivity of higher education and a time in the not-so-distant past when women and people of color were not allowed to attend college. She added that she admires academic and university settings for the “openness to learn and develop” from students and urged university leaders to consider how they are contributing to this moment in history.
Following Brown’s presentation, HSU hosted two additional breakout sessions: “Art and Community Activism” and “The Salvation of Democracy: Civic Engagement of the Dispossessed.”