With students back in classes for the spring semester, the College of William and Mary’s year-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of African-American students residing on campus continues with its first event of 2018. Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, the former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, will lead a program honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday.
“What’s going on at William and Mary is something rather special,” Cole said. “I’m excited to come to William and Mary to be a part of all this.”
Cole sees the program celebrating King’s civil rights activism as a natural extension of the 50th commemoration, as his bravery mirrors that of Karen Ely, Lynn Briley and Janet Brown — the three women who became the college’s first black female undergraduate students and the first black students allowed to live on campus in 1967.
She said the college’s observance of the anniversary is itself courageous.
“It says William and Mary’s relationship with black students, faculty and staff has been anything but smooth,” said Cole, adding that this extends to other marginalized groups such as women, the LGBTQ community, Muslims and students with disabilities. “For a university to say that says to me, there’s a chance that we can do better.”
Through her keynote address, Cole plans to connect King’s ideals with the trials of the present day, encouraging the audience to ponder what he might have to say in 2018.
“If those dreams are ever to become realities, we have got so much work to do,” she said. “I am feeling that my country is more divided through public expressions of divisiveness than I have seen since the days that I grew up in the segregated South in Jacksonville, Florida.”
Cole said she hopes the program might help people better understand the world in which we live and inspire them to help make it better.
“I always try to include a response to the question, what is to be done?” she said. “This talk will be quite specific in terms of my call to action for all of us throughout our nation but also to the community at William and Mary.”
Want to go?
William and Mary’s Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration program runs 7-9 p.m. Thursday at the Sadler Center Commonwealth Auditorium, 200 Stadium Drive. Free and open to the public.
