For Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru, the best way to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is not to celebrate him, but to honor the civil rights leader.
The University of Connecticut’s first Rhodes Scholar was the keynote speaker at West Hartford’s 24th annual observance of the holiday, which was held in the town hall auditorium. Gatheru said she’s not ready to celebrate when there are issues like 2.3 million people in prison with 33 percent of African Americans making up that population. She said it’s hard to celebrate when Connecticut harbors the most income inequality in the nation. She observed it’s hard to celebrate when “my life matters is seen as divisive.”
“It’s not, in this moment, to celebrate him,” she said addressing a packed auditorium. “It is instead to honor him and this honor is a verb. It is a call to action … to live an unarmed truth and unconditional love, to have the courage to speak an unpopular truth and to love unconditionally without a guarantee of reciprocity,” she said.
Gatheru said she had to confront the history of the Rhode Scholarship program that was created in 1902 to “support and uplift the brightest young minds in the world and help them fight the world’s fight.” She noted the scholarship’s inception “actually contradicts this mission” with British businessman Cecil Rhodes a “imperialist, racist, colonialist — a man who literally built his fortune off the blood, sweat and tears of black South Africans.”
“As I live an unarmed truth and unconditional love, my challenge for myself is that I must acknowledge this history, confront it and continue to hold myself accountable to it for the rest of my life. It means doing what I can in my lifetime to live a life of intentional public service and to do everything in my power to support the very communities that this legacy continues to disenfranchise,” she said.
Eshe Griffith, a student at Conard High School, gave one of the student perspectives speeches and talked about her experiences with racism when she declined to stand for the pledge of allegiance and was lectured about it by a teacher. But she refused to let the incident define her and is heading off to college to become a biomedical engineer.
“Two years ago I was a shy girl who feared openly to be herself, always wanting to hide in the shadows,” she said. “Today, I’m a first-generation student, an immigrant and the daughter of a hard-working woman. … I am black and I am female and I stand today as a representative of the dream Dr. King had. … It is our duty and responsibility to create change. Students like me need to be seen, heard and given the same opportunities that others have.
“We are all one person,” she added. “However, by speaking for the unspoken and striving for true excellence there’s nothing that we can’t accomplish. The time is now. And like Dr. Martin Luther King said, the time is right to always do what is right.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the holiday is “not about a day off, it’s about a day on” for social justice, for the fight against racial animosity, bigotry and hatred “which are more alive today than in past years.”
“You are bringing together the love and the light … that will bring us together at a time when we are potentially more divided than ever before. Those divisions. those animosities are the result of a lack of leadership at the very top of this country. Today is about reflection and action,” he said.
Gatheru said the framework to achieve what King called a “beloved community” with “a society based on justice, equal opportunity and love of one’s fellow human being” is still there.
“That’s a framework to which we all can and should work toward and a part of rediscovering King and seeking refuge in his words,” she said. “Let us find solace in his call to rise with love every day because we are, as King said, confronted with a fierce urgency of now. I believe we have the ability to meet darkness with light and to create a just, humane world King dreamed of and to one day be able to truly celebrate Dr. King.”
Peter Marteka can be reached at pmarteka@courant.com
