![\"Phyllis](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/01\/web-170115_MLK_Interfaith_Service_0473.jpg\")
<\/a>Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
They sang “This Is My Song,” which includes these lines:<\/p>\n
This is my home, the country where my heart is
\nHere are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
\nBut other hearts in other lands are beating,
\nWith hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.<\/p>\n
\n
7:45 p.m. Jan. 15 \u2014 Peter J. Gomes Chapel<\/h3>\n
The Rev. Dr. Charles Howard, university chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania, delivers the sermon. He told a story about meeting the late Peter Gomes ’65, for whom the Bates chapel was named in 2012.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
At the time, Howard had recently been appointed university chaplain at Penn, and he asked Gomes, the legendary Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church, for advice “for a rookie chaplain.”<\/p>\n
Gomes said, “Always walk into the room as if you are the most important person there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which got a laugh. But Gomes continued, \u201cAlways walk into the room as if you are the most important person there…because to God you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, as Howard told the gathering in Gomes Chapel, “there is something bigger on our side that won’t let us lose” in the work for social justice and fairness.<\/p>\n
“Walk into 2017 as if you are the most important person in the room…because to God you are.”<\/p>\n
\n
9:34 a.m. Jan. 16 \u2014 Peter J. Gomes Chapel<\/h3>\n
Monday morning, a standing-room only crowd gathers in the Chapel to hear historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad deliver the MLK Day keynote.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
In her welcome, President Clayton Spencer noted that “injustice and violence have been with us in this country since our founding. Our history cannot be told, though it often is, without the narratives of the slave trade, of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of the battles for civil rights, economic justice, and freedom from state violence.”<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she said, “takes on this history in our chosen theme, ‘Reparations: Addressing Racial Injustices.'”<\/p>\n
Because reparations “begin with acknowledgement,” she said, this year’s theme “challenges us to ask ourselves how we can move beyond the ‘fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity’ that Dr. King warned us of in 1967\u00a0\u2014 a fantasy that assumes American society is hospital to fair play and that steady progress toward racial harmony is inevitable.”<\/p>\n
\n
9:59 a.m. Jan. 16 \u2014 Peter J. Gomes Chapel<\/h3>\n
Muhammad delivers his address, “No Reparations Without Racial Education: Martin Luther King on the Tyranny of Ignorance.”<\/p>\n
<\/a>Josh Kuckens\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
Muhammad reminded his Bates audience that understanding America’s history of racial injustice is the first step toward redressing that injustice.<\/p>\n
“Since it is not OK to teach our children to deny the Jewish Holocaust, then why is it OK in far too many schools and homes to deny the centrality of slavery to the American story?” he wondered.<\/p>\n
Later, Muhammad said:<\/p>\n
Too often we treat history like it is an opinion. I’ve served on national and local committees to solve this problem or that, and I’ve watched educated people invoke their own experiences as historical proof.<\/p>\n
We all have opinions, but we are not all historically literate, never mind fluent. The same problem of climate change denial holds in how most Americans think about our past \u2014 we at least give economists and environmentalists a chance to shake our beliefs. Historians, not so much.<\/p>\n
\n
10:31 a.m. Jan. 16 \u2014 Peter J. Gomes Chapel<\/h3>\n
After his talk, Muhammad greets Lewiston High School students who are members of the 21st Century Leadership Program.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
Another stunning point made by Muhammad was that, in a sense, the Obama presidency closed the book on civil-rights era notions of progress.<\/p>\n
With Obama, Americans were told how “racial representation and the content of one’s character are the perfect antidotes to racism.”<\/p>\n
“But we were mistaken,” said Muhammad, who added:<\/p>\n
The half-century-old rules and standard operating procedures for racial advancement are now obsolete. There is no racial barrier left to be broken. There is no office in the land blacks first can ascend \u2014 from mayors to governors to attorney generals, and now the presidency \u2014 that will serve as a magical platform for saving black or brown people and the soul of a nation from its racist past.<\/p>\n
America’s institutions cannot be made over by simply dressing them up in more shades of brown and expecting a more just and equitable outcome. In this new era, the structures and the values of our institutions are the challenges we must now unflinchingly confront.<\/p>\n
\n
11:07 a.m. Jan. 16, Pettengill Classroom G52<\/h3>\n
Different day, same old ripoff.<\/p>\n
The music industry’s longstanding agility in stealing from black artists was the topic of “A Cultural Debt,” led by Associate Professor of Music Dale Chapman, seen here speaking in front of a projected image of Count Basie and Benny Goodman.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Josh Kuckens\/Bates College<\/p><\/div>\n
It’s a sorry story that begins as far back as the 1840s and the minstrel shows in which white performers in blackface parodied African American performance. Citing Eric Lott’s 1993 study Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class<\/em>, Chapman pointed out that the minstrel shows constituted a kind of “politics of ridicule” that helped white working-class Americans keep black culture in its place.<\/p>\n White jazz musicians like Paul Whiteman aimed to “make a lady” out of black jazz for white audiences. Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, through white artists like Elvis Presley, took the other route and cashed in by bottling the vitality of black music for mainstream consumption.<\/p>\n Labels like Atlantic cheated African American hitmakers out of revenues from the sales and publishing of their music \u2014 but when rappers found success decades later by sampling older recordings, the industry turned the tables, so to speak, and hauled them into court for theft of intellectual property.<\/p>\n As the people in the classroom sang jazz riffs, tapped toes to Benny Goodman, and swayed heads to Ruth Brown, it was a living demonstration that the thieves at least had good taste.<\/p>\n As Chapman said, even as the white establishment seeks to co-opt black culture for profit or power, there is a fascination “and very real desire for the cultural and musical practices of African Americans that would renew itself again and again and again.”<\/p>\n Or, as Smokey Robinson said, sometimes the hunter gets captured by the game. \u2014 Doug Hubley<\/em><\/p>\n In a full Hedge Hall classroom, Associate Professor of History Joe Hall (right) introduces, from left, Esther Attean, Kathy Paul, and Penthea Burns, women at the forefront of efforts in Maine to confront, expose, and help to heal the harm done to Native American children by the state’s child welfare system.<\/p>\n
\n10:52 a.m. Jan. 16 \u2014 Hedge Hall Classroom 106<\/a><\/h3>\n