The celebration, held on the Harrisonburg, Virginia, campus from Saturday, Jan. 13, to Monday, Jan. 15, is themed “Remember, Celebrate, Thrive.”

“We need to remember that a lot of people are standing on the shoulders of giants who came before us during the Civil Rights Movement,” said Celeste Thomas, director of multicultural student services at EMU and chair of the committee planning the celebration. “We have to remember their sacrifice and all their hard work, but we also have to celebrate the accomplishments that came out of that. So, we celebrate what has been achieved and then stand on those shoulders so we can thrive as a community.”

A wide range of activities and events will honor the iconic civil rights leader:

Saturday, Jan. 13

11 a.m.-2 p.m. — Northeast Neighborhood tour: Monica Robinson, executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project, will lead a tour of the Northeast Neighborhood, a historic community built by and for African-Americans in Harrisonburg following the Civil War. 

Stops along the tour include the Bethel AME Church, with information about the neighboring Dallard-Newman House, and discussions and lunch provided at the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center. Rides from EMU will depart from the Black Lives Matter mural in front of the University Commons at 10:30 a.m. Registration is required to attend the tour, and is available online at emu.edu/mlk.

Sunday, Jan. 14

6 p.m. — Screening of Rustin: A biopic of Bayard Rustin, adviser to MLK and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, will be shown in the MainStage Theater on Sunday evening. The film, released in November, stars actor Colman Domingo as the title character and Chris Rock as activist Roy Wilkins. Rustin faced struggles not only because of his race, but also his sexuality as an openly gay Black man. 

“The Civil Rights Movement was a diverse movement of people from all spectrums of ethnicity, religion and sexuality,” Thomas said. 

A talk-back session after the screening will discuss the film (runtime: one hour, 46 minutes; rating: PG-13) and answer questions. 

Monday, Jan. 15

9:15 a.m. — Solidarity March: A silent march will proceed from the BLM mural outside University Commons to Lehman Auditorium to kick off Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

“Marches were what happened throughout the Movement,” Thomas said. “You had the March on Washington, the march between Selma and Montgomery, you had marches in Memphis, to show solidarity.” 

Students are invited to create posters in the Student Life office on Sunday night to display during the march.

“It’s a silent march, so that people are concentrating and reflecting on the movement and how it has supported them and how it affects them today,” Thomas said. 

9:30 a.m. — Speak Out: Following the march, EMU students, faculty and staff and other community members are encouraged to share their thoughts, feelings, music, poetry and anything else supporting the celebration’s theme at Lehman Auditorium. 

“People will have an opportunity to come to the microphone and share in whichever way they want to share,” Thomas said. 

The event will wrap up with a preselected student monologue.

10 a.m. — Black & 25 in America: Playwright and actor Jeremy Gillett will perform his one-man show, Black & 25 in America, at Lehman Auditorium. The Kentucky native portrays five different characters in a series of vignettes about the lives of young Black people in America that explores the issues of race, class, gender and identity. 

A talk-back session will offer audience members a chance to engage with him after the performance. 

12:30 p.m. — Lunch at Northlawn Cafeteria: A special soul food-inspired menu will be served at the dining hall. “I want to give credit to Dining Services, Pioneer College Caterers, and to Food Service Director Shannon Grinnan for working with us on that special menu for the day,” Thomas said. Regular dining charges will apply for the lunch. 

2 p.m. — Convocation featuring the VUU Gospel Choir: Hailing from Richmond, the Virginia Union University Gospel Choir will perform at Lehman Auditorium. In October, the historically Black university invited the EMU Chamber Singers to perform on its stage with them and Grammy Award-winning artist Hezekiah Walker during a live recording. You can read more about the partnership between the two schools here. 

EMU Music Program Director David Berry will open Convocation with a medley, followed by remarks from EMU President Susan Schultz Huxman, Thomas and Harrisonburg Mayor Deanna Reed. After a series of songs from the VUU Gospel Choir, the EMU Chamber Singers will join them for a performance of I Need You to Survive.

Those attending Convocation are asked to bring a nonperishable food item to donate for the food drive.

7 p.m. — There is a Field screening: A showing of the movie There is a Field inside the old Common Grounds space will round off the MLK Jr. Celebration on Monday evening. The movie mirrors the struggles of Palestinian activists in Israel with members of Black communities in the U.S. It will be followed by a talk-back session, cosponsored by Tim Seidel, Trina Nussbaum and the Center for Interfaith Engagement. This event has been postponed due to inclement weather

All events, other than the lunch on Monday, are free to attend. For more information about the performers and events, visit emu.edu/mlk. 

Thomas credited the EMU Black Student Alliance and Tyler Goss, director for student engagement and leadership development, for their help.

“I think, if people come out,” Thomas said, “they’ll learn something not only about other people, but also about themselves.”

“You can ask me questions later,” she called as she climbed into her friend Robin Lyttle’s car. “Let’s go!”

Allen, who last year published a memoir “The Way It Was, Not the Way It Is” about her experiences in the Newtown area during the 1930s and ’40s, spent the afternoon and evening with 28 students teaching, sharing and interpreting African American history, culture and experience.

This was the beginning of a 2015 article about EMU’s local context cross-cultural experience. Doris Harper Allen, who , was a major contributor to that experience. She helped orient students in that class to Harrisonburg’s racial history through her memoir (self-published, 2015), used as a course reading.Ěý

“Dr. Allen was also a guide of educational learning tours for EMU students collaborating with community and church leaders in the historic Northeast Neighborhood of Harrisonburg,” said Professor Deanna Durham, who with her husband Byron Peachey, now academic advocacy advisor, co-taught the local context cross cultural for several summers.

“I loved the enthusiasm and seriousness Dr. Allen shared with our students,” Durham said. “She wanted them to understand her own history both the immense joy and pride she has for this community and the deep harms caused by others. We left our time with her challenged and delighted!”

Allen, who received during JMU’s 2019 commencement, was born in Harrisonburg’s Northeast neighborhood on East Effinger Street in 1927, according to her online biography. Barred from attending James Madison University, then Madison College, due to racial segregation, she worked as a cook for Madison President G. Tyler Miller before enrolling at Marshall University in the early 1970s. In West Virginia, she worked as a teacher before returning to Harrisonburg, where she became involved in her native neighborhood’s revitalization efforts.

“It is with profound sorrow, we share the passing of our oldest trailblazer,” the NAACP said in a statement posted to its Facebook page late Friday. “She left a profound legacy within the city.”

That legacy was recognized last month when James Madison University after her.

ĚýHarper published a second memoir, “Jim Crow in the ‘30s, 40s, 50s and 60s: What was life really like in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County under the Jim Crow laws?” She gives a on her most recent book.

Read and watch tributes from the and

Jodie Geddes, a graduate student at ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř who is attending the [SPI], helped organize the event with help from the and . She said Americans shouldn’tĚýturn a blind eye to events.

“If something happens in my hometown in New York, I carry it with me,” she said. “When something happens in Burundi or any other country, we can feel that.”

Stan Maclin, leader of the of Virginia Organizing, called the number of high-profile confrontations between black men and police “alarming.”

“It will continue to get out of hand like it did in the ’60s,” he said. “A lot of people say, ‘Don’t talk about the past’… we need to talk about it.”

Maclin said the only way to bring about change is for everyone to stand togetherĚýregardless of skin color.

“That won’t happen if we don’t come together like we are today,” he said.

Oscar Apesough, a Harrisonburg resident from Nigeria [who also attended SPI], said he attended theĚývigilĚýbecause he wants to find “ways we can support the idea of working through this.”

Apesough said civic organizations should work together with law enforcement to restore community relations and maintain peace.

“It should be peaceful,” he said. “It shouldn’t be violent.”

Courtesy of the DailyĚýNews-RecordĚý

An annual and favorite tradition among the EMU community is a trip to Sprague’s Barbershop in downtown Harrisonburg, where Tyrone Sprague gives haircuts along with lively conversation on the sixth floor of a Court Square building. Sunlight streamed in through lacy beige curtains as a group of EMU students filed in to learn and discuss the history of racism in Harrisonburg.

“America’s original sin is that America was established as a white society,” with slavery being a key foundation of the nation, said visit facilitator Stan Maclin, vice president of the Northeast Neighborhood Association, a community group working to keep that area of Harrisonburg clean, safe, and crime-free.

In the 1950s and 60s, the northeast corner of Harrisonburg – where Rose’s and Autozone are now – was a bustling neighborhood of black culture and business. Then came Project R4. Cities across the country were given the opportunity to receive development funds for “urban renewal” projects in areas labeled as slums. Harrisonburg’s black neighborhood was declared eminent domain, residents were displaced, and their land sold to commercial developers.

Maclin cited King’s “Beyond Vietnam” address in response to structural racism such as Project R4: “I am convinced,” King wrote, “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”

Sprague, giving a haircut during the visit, said that he sees this “revolution of values” happening in younger generations. Across different ethnicities, “they eat together, they laugh together, they go dancing together. In the 1960s and 70s, you didn’t see that,” said Sprague, who grew up in Farmville, Virginia. Sprague remembers that his mother – and white culture – taught him to fear repercussions for looking a white woman in the eyes if he passed her on the street.

The celebration also brought visitors to the EMU campus and the local community, including The Rev. Dr. Nikita Okembe-Ra Imani, a prominent poet, hip-hop artist, musician, and black history scholar from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Speaking at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a Sunday service, Imani credited King’s confidence in the face of such ingrained mistrust to his faith in God. When we see “mayhem and destruction, the kind of sickness without compassion,” said Imani, “the world is calling for the people of confidence.” King’s ideology and strategies were direct results of his pacifistic Christianity, Imani explained. “The system had tanks. The system had batons … the system had financial power. King had the Word.”

At the next day’s MLK Day chapel service, Imani called all Christians to join together. Cultures of violence, he said, are ultimately impotent before Christians, who “bring power and brotherhood where there is hatred and malevolence.”

Accompanying Imani to Bethel AME and also during the on-campus MLK Day service was the EMU gospel choir and newly installed Harrisonburg mayor Chris Jones.

Jones, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led an afternoon community program at Lucy Simms Center (formerly Lucy Simms School, this segregated school taught area black children from 1939-1966).

The program included two songs by the MLK Celebration Choir. EMU members of this community group included campus chaplain , program assistant , and , of .

Thomas co-chaired the MLK Celebration planning committee with student Christian Parks. The committee wanted to “create a celebration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. by concentrating on who he was as a person as well as what he did for our country,” she said.

“The hope is that King’s vision and dream can inspire more dreams and more efforts,” said Parks. “In the gathered beloved community, I believe we can dream an America that truly finds the beauty in all things.”