When senior Maria Gonzalez was a first-year Martin Luther King scholar at Ithaca College, she said the man her scholarship is named for was insufficiently celebrated within the campus community.

“After all the work [Martin Luther King Jr.] did, sacrificing his life like this, there was no recognition,” Gonzalez said.

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MLK Day 2008: MC Lyte keynote

MC Lyte was the keynote speaker for this year’s MLK Day, the first such holiday held by the college.

• Related: MLK Scholars’ theater experience

On Monday, after a four-year push by an informal MLK Scholar group, “Have a Dream,” the college commemorated King with a day free of classes. Instead, the day was filled with multi-disciplinary programming conducive to remembrance and reflection on King’s life and work.

The college is one of only two institutions in the country to offer a MLK scholars program. President Peggy R. Williams said the college began planning for this year’s celebration because of  MLK scholar initiatives and a collective push from the campus community to observe King’s birthday. The Presidential Task Force on Diversity included a recommendation in its Spring 2005 report for an official recognition of the holiday. The schedule was finalized last year.   

“[King] should be honored and celebrated, and we should be educated about him, his impact and the issues that were part of his life,” Williams said.

Williams said the primary challenge in orchestrating this year’s “Day on, not day off” was coordinating the 15 full weeks of classes necessitated by New York state law. As a result of canceling a day of classes, spring semester’s finals will end on a Monday instead of a Friday, requiring some students to remain on campus up to four additional days. Senior week will also be shortened to five days.

Senior class president Tiffany Casale said though recognizing King should take precedence, more students might have attended if classes were held Monday.

“Celebrating MLK Jr., Day is really important, but actually I feel like more people would have attended the events [because] … students who live off-campus would be here to celebrate,” she said.

Casale also said alterations to the spring schedule will inconvenience some students.

“The [group] I feel bad for is students that have to stay until the following Monday [of exams] and their families who have to work and can’t come and move them back,” she said.

John Rawlins, assistant director of the Ithaca Achievement Program in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, said around 500 people registered for the day’s events.

Senior Megan Bauer, a student leadership consultant at the Center for Student Leadership and Involvement, said while she felt there was a strong turnout, some students remained unaware of the benefits of participating.

“I don’t think that people understand sometimes how much they could get of out of these things by going to it,” she said.

Around 350 people attended Monday’s first event, featuring keynote speaker MC Lyte. Lyte, the first female solo rapper to be nominated for a Grammy, perform at Carnegie Hall and record a gold single, talked about enacting positive change: a fundamental cornerstone of King’s vision.

Freshman MLK scholar Cassandra Leveille said finding ways to enact social change is a daunting prospect, but she has been inspired by Civil Rights activists. “Day on, not day off” not only lauded King’s accomplishments in his short lifetime, it emphasized the legions of other individuals, she said. It was embodied in first-year MLK scholars’ performance, “Reflections on the Movement,” which contributed their efforts, and often lives, to the pursuit of equality.

“Seeing their courage — that was very extraordinary to me,” she said.

Rawlins said diversity initiatives on campus have increased in recent years, channeling King’s ideological vision for an equal society. Rawlins said the dream — however it is defined — has yet to be fulfilled, and limited definitions of diversity should be subjugated.

“When we talk about diversity, I think our campus [does] a good job, but of course there’s always room to improve,” he said. “Diversity crosses all barriers and all lines.”

Deb Mohlenhoff, assistant director for community service development at the Center for Student Leadership and Involvement, said in nearly two decades of work at the college, she has seen the campus become a safer environment for students to confront relevant disparities.

“We’ve created a safer space for people to come forward and have a conversation,” she said. “Confronting issues and engaging in civil conversation has defined this evolution.”

Efforts to facilitate understanding and value for equality on campus have included the “Erase the Hate” Rally in April 2005 and development of the Diversity Awareness Committee in 2003.

Rawlins said many students, while trying to develop a more critical political and social consciousness, recognize the need for change but don’t know how to approach it. He described the day as a “wake-up call to the uninvolved” and an opportunity to recognize social and economic inequalities persisting today.

“Students have a perception of what a movement is supposed to be,” he said. “You don’t have to be the person that’s doing a sit-in or you don’t have to be chained to a desk. …We have to change our mindset of what we think activism is.”

Some students chose to contribute to their communities by participating in the service component of the day’s programming, while others attended presentations held by students and faculty of the college.

Faculty gave presentations on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in U.S. media, the present-day perception of King, the struggle for civil rights in Ithaca, King’s letters from Birmingham Jail and the Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at the Rochester Crozer Divinity School. The Protest Theater Project presented selections from King’s speeches.

The MLK Celebration Concert, in its second year, was attended by more than 750 people, and featured a dramatic reading by Lyte and concluded the day.

Gonzalez said the combination of strong programming and significant student involvement made the college’s first daylong celebration for King’s legacy a success and said she believes the day will spur discussion and dialogue within the college community that will elevate awareness for social inequalities.

“I’m very happy with how it turned out,” Gonzalez said. “I think we set a standard and people are only going to continue to raise it.”

Rawlins said ultimately, the day reminded students of the enduring relevance of King’s message, encouraging today’s generation to develop their own vision and voice.

“We have talents and we have gifts, and we have the ability to do something small that will affect larger change in the future,” Rawlins said. “[The day] was a good reminder, especially at the start of the semester, that ... together we can create larger change.”