Candlelight vigil commemorates the life and lessons of Martin Luther King Jr.

Keeping
the dream alive
Candlelight vigil commemorates the life and lessons of Martin Luther King Jr.
…………………………………………………………………

BY
ROBERT STANTON
Special to the Rice News

Had Martin Luther
King Jr. escaped an assassin’s bullet, he would have
turned 72 Jan. 15, his nationally celebrated birthday.

The slain civil
rights leader’s dream was kept alive during the sixth
annual Martin Luther King Jr. vigil held on the Rice campus.

As a gentle
breeze blew under starlit skies, participants held candles
and the Rev. R.H. Gilmore delivered a moving rendition of
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at Willy’s
Statue in the Academic Quadrangle. Gilmore is pastor of
Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Dayton.

During Gilmore’s
recitation of the stirring speech, a young girl whispered
to her mother, “Mommy, are you crying?” as the
woman wiped a tear from her eye.

Carrying their
candles, participants in the vigil sang “We Shall Overcome”
as they led a procession to the Rice Chapel. There, they
heard spirituals performed by the Rice Melodious Voices
of Praise Gospel Choir. Soloist Charlene Sadberry sang “Lift
Every Voice and Sing.”

The ceremony,
however, would be a “just leisure … a totally
meaningless gesture if it isn’t taken to heart,”
said keynote speaker Otis King, professor at Texas Southern
University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. “If
nothing is taken and used, what have we accomplished?”

Otis King urged
his audience to “resurrect the values for which Dr.
King lived”: equal opportunity for all, regardless
of ethnic origin or skin color. “The real tragedy today,”
he added, is the unwillingness of people “to take any
stand at all, especially if it would cause risk to one’s
own self-interest.

“Each of
us is capable of speaking out about everyday injustices
and addressing some of the problems facing us,” he
said. “In a word, we cannot be neutral. We must take
a stand. Each of us should make a commitment to do something
that is representative of the life he lived.”

The outlook
for young people is bright, said King, who was the city
of Houston’s first black city attorney under Mayor
Fred Hofheinz, and he urged students to think beyond materialistic
considerations.

“In a materialistic
environment, what is to be your beacon?” he asked.
“What should guide you? In the long run, it is we who
must guide us. In the end, you won’t be judged by degrees
or finances, but by what you stood for.”

Otis King also
urged his audience to repeat daily: “I will stand for
something. I will not be a reed in the wind, testing consensus.
A person who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
We all have an obligation to make Dr. King’s dream
a reality.”

The significance
of the observance was not lost on Rice sophomore Lumumba
Sroufe, who joined the 100 participants attending the event,
sponsored by the Black Student Association.

“Some people
take for granted where we are right now,” said Sroufe,
a kinesiology major. “We’ve obviously come very
far, not only African-Americans but all minorities, to [be
able to] come to a place like Rice and be able to study.

“It’s
important for everyone to realize that it was a struggle
to get to where we are, and Martin Luther King was a big
part of that,” he added.

Audrey Ette,
president of the Black Student Association, said she hoped
the audience “truly took Professor Otis King’s
message to heart. He challenged us all to take a stand and
actively pursue those things that we know are right and
work to eliminate injustice.”

— Robert
Stanton is a free-lance writer.