Jamaica leaders honor MLK, Jr.

BY CHRISTINA SANTUCCI

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:15 PM EST

Queens leaders gathered in Jamaica recently to commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Dr. King envisioned great things for our people and our nation, and I am happy to honor his memory and that legacy,” said the event’s keynote speaker Marcia Keizs, the President of York College, at the event on Wednesday, January 16.

During her speech, Keizs related her own experience of wanting to be a high school English teacher, pursuing her education in another country, earning her master’s and Ph.D. and finally being appointed to her post at York.

“Had Dr. King not lived and fought for us, this might not be a reality,” she said, explaining that she had traveled from her homeland, the island of Jamaica, to college in Canada before relocating to New York.

“Like so many in my generation who found ourselves in places like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the 1970s, we were the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement,” Keizs said, adding, that nowadays young people sometimes “take it for granted that these opportunities were always here.”

Keizs credited King and his fellow civic rights activists like Rosa Parks for “opening doors” for herself and others and pledged to help those interested pursue their dreams through education.

“This legacy must live, we must nurture it,” Keizs said.

Following her talk, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall gave a tribute to King.

“He was a powerful general,” Marshall said. “And he had the most powerful weapon in the world - love.”

A young activist in the 1960s, Marshall said she was taken with King’s ideology.

“Just to listen to Dr. King speak, you felt like you had to get on that high road with him,” she said, calling his message a “ray of hope.”

Marshall also spoke about her own upbringing in Harlem - where the importance of education was instilled in her day-to-day life, a belief she holds today.

“If our young people don’t get an education, they don’t have a chance in this world,” Marshall told the collected community members and youngsters from the Christian-based dance group G.L.R.

The dance troupe from St. Albans took to the stage at the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL) to perform several traditional African routines to the accompaniment of drums during the event. In addition, soprano Mari-Yan L. Pringle sang several songs, including Lift Every Voice and We Shall Overcome.

While concluding her speech, Marshall referenced a passage of the speech King delivered after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 - less than four years before he was shot and killed.

After accepting the award, King said, “Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”