As with every spring semester, the first day of classes was preceded by Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This year, as is customary, multiple campus organizations organized MLK Service Week. This year, the organizational committee was comprised of members of multiple organizations across all three Lewis & Clark campuses.
According to one of the committee co-chairs, Director of Student Leadership and Service (SLS) Harold McNaron, making sure the events applied to a wide variety of people was a key goal.
“We really tried to provide a number of events to catch many people and different interests,” McNaron said. “Because people want to honor and learn about Dr. King in different ways and the Civil Rights movement in general.”
Events included a lecture on MLK Jr. by Michelle DePass, a screening of the movie Harriet, a step and activism workshop, a service day and a blood drive. Events were distributed across the three campuses in order to include the entire LC community.
The MLK week committee prioritized the quality of the events over the quantity. Zakiya Newman ‘21, co-chair of MLK week committee and a Black Student Union (BSU) leader, highlighted the committee’s effort to ensure the quality and variety of the events.
“Instead of doing a ton of events every single day, we wanted to try to spread it out over two weeks and make it more focused on the quality and engagement of a few specific events,” Newman said. “(We wanted to be) hitting different dimensions so that it’s not just all lectures or all workshops.”
The MLK committee hopes to expand the attendance and inclusivity of MLK week events in the future. The committee wanted to make it clear that MLK week is open to all.
“We wanted to emphasize that these events are open to all the community — it’s not like you have to be a POC or Black person to celebrate the events,” Newman said. “It’s inclusive to everyone.”
In order to address diversity within the Black community, the committee reached out to the Muslim Student Association (MSA) which organized a panel on being Black and Muslim. Amatullah Aman ’21, a panelist at the event, highlighted that there are more Black Muslims on the LC campus than many think.
“In creating space for Black Muslims, especially on this campus, we open up the conversation of Blackness and Islam in America, a history we often hear nothing about, to understand what it means to sit on this intersectionality, and how Black Muslims in America have used historically used Islam as a means of freedom,”Aman said via email.
The MLK service day, hosted by SLS, had substantial engagement, both from LC students and the larger LC community. Nahla Yeejsuab Lee, a graduate assistant at SLS and a member of the MLK week committee, was happy with the participation of the LC community and hopes that students and the community will continue to volunteer in the Portland area.
“I encourage students to go out and do some kind of community service or reach out to a community or nonprofit organizations and just kind of do things with them,” Lee said. “I think it’s really important.”
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