When MLK Day Speaker Feminista Jones approached the podium to speak about the misconceptions surrounding the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she was greeted by a wave of applause from the packed audience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations at Central Michigan University resumed on January 17 at the French Auditorium with Jones.
The Multicultural Academic Student Services Office (MASS) sponsored the event, highlighting how radical Martin Luther King Jr. was, and how the educational system has omitted crucial details of his life and legacy to make him more appealing to a broader audience.
“We’ve been taught bits and pieces of his life and his works and the things that have been determined to be palatable,” said Jones. “The things that won’t scare you, the things that won’t inspire you necessarily to do anything that disrupts the status quo.”
According to Jones, Dr. King was not only a supporter of racial equality in general but also of labor rights, housing rights, and frequently spoke out against war. All of these things led to him losing some of his supporters. She claimed that when students study Dr. King in schools, much of this is overlooked and that popular narratives have altered many aspects of his life, including his relationship with Malcolm X.
Jones argued that if people looked closely at the two activists, they would realize that they are not as opposed to one another as the general public tends to believe. Many people do not learn about Dr. King's real background due to these false narratives, which leaves them with a distorted, incomplete understanding of the man.
By telling personal tales and cracking jokes, Jones elicited audience participation and kept it up throughout the event. Jones questioned the audience's knowledge of King's life to gauge how much of it had been excluded from the curriculum and to assess how well-versed the audience was in it.
Jones's work focuses on race, feminism, queer identity, and mental health. She is an activist, author, educator, and retired social worker. She is a professor at Temple University and the author of the award-winning book Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminism is Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets.
Jones underlined that well-known social justice activists started when they were still fairly young. When they first began to make a difference, leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks were all around the same age as college students. And today, the responsibility for fighting and altering the world lies with the upcoming generation.
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