Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Guest speaker April Grigsby gave a chapel talk Jan. 19 in honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The daughter of a mother from Trinidad and Tobago and a father from Liberia, she is a graduate of Kent School and earned a B.A. in political science from Yale University and a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University. While at Kent, she was a class representative, a dorm prefect, a newspaper columnist and editor, and president of the Culture Club. After high school, she continued to be involved with conscience-raising activities as co-moderator of the Black Student Alliance at Yale and head of the Christian Coalition at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. April has lived in Ghana and completed her master’s thesis research in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she facilitated much of the same work that she currently implements as a therapist in New York City. She works with groups and individuals, specifically with survivors of trauma, displaced West African immigrants, the formerly incarcerated and severely emotionally disturbed children.
 

During her chapel talk, April asked how the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is still relevant today and suggested that “the Dream has gotten much bigger,” just as the face of America has changed. She pointed to the micro transgressions that can snowball into an avalanche of intolerance. “As people of African descent are further integrated into society, the social, economic and political barriers get harder to identify and therefore harder to address,” she explained.
 

She said that her training as a social worker teaches her to move her analysis from the micro or individual level to the mezzo, which is the community or institutional level, to the macro or broadest level, of a specific society or the world. “You may not be racist as an individual but if we are going to live in a world that honors the dignity of the individual, the conversation on race has to consider the individual, that person’s community and the society’s treatment of that individual,” she said.
 

And when students do see or hear racial intolerance, she encouraged them to speak up and “find that person who can help you address what makes you uncomfortable.”
 

With regard to interpersonal relationships, she further encouraged students to “respect people’s boundaries about their own identity and how they experience it.” She cautioned against asking one person to be the spokesperson for a whole group because it is better to learn about the complexity of experiences within a group.
 

And when students graduate from Westminster, she asked them, “Will you challenge yourself to participate in a world where everyone around you is not like you?”
 

She also emphasized how racial equality was not and is not the responsibility of people of color. “If you see images from the protests across the South, the Freedom Riders were mostly white American college students, privileged in race and in pocket, who defied their parents conventions and put their lives on the line to register black voters in the deep South.”
 

She closed by saying, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not do it alone. He was martyred for the cause so that African-Americans could live with dignity today. He was the face of a movement that was about the shift of how we see people in this society. Yes, the conversation started off with African-Americans because of the enormity of the impact of slavery, that peculiar institution, and we are still working for equal participation in society today. But the conversation today has to broaden to include identity in every sense, which makes it even more urgent that we all see ourselves as responsible for The Dream.”
 

April’s remarks were followed by Chorale performing U2’s “MLK,” and Anissa Joseph ’17, Alexa Green ’17 and Katherine Eckerson ’17 singing Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.”