When Syracuse University holds its 31st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in the Carrier Dome on Sunday, it will include more student involvement and integration between faculty, staff, students and community members than in past years.

Unlike in the past, all tickets for a dinner preceding the evening program will be for general seating — rather than separating seating between faculty, staff, students and community members. Additionally, the evening program will include a student speaker for the first time ever.

The evening program, which is the largest university-sponsored event in celebration of King’s legacy in the United States, will begin Sunday at 5:30 p.m.

The evening program will include an address by Marc Lamont Hill, an award-winning journalist, host of HuffPost Live and a BET News and CNN political contributor. During the program there will also be a presentation of the 2016 Unsung Hero Awards, music by a community choir and entertainment by student performers.

A dinner will be hosted at 4:30 p.m. preceding the program.

Catherine Kellman, the chairwoman for the 2016 MLK Celebration committee, said the reason for switching to general seating was so people who may have normally never had the chance to interact could talk to one another about why King is important to them, what brought them to the event and how they define their own activism.

Malik Evans, a junior marketing and advertising dual major who has worked on the celebration as a student representative since his freshman year, said there have been many additions to the MLK Celebration this year, including a ceremony on MLK Day.

The ceremony was held at Hendricks Chapel on the first day back from Winter Break.

The dinner represents another change, Kellman said.

“In the past, students’ perspectives on the dinner is that it often doesn’t connect with them and they don’t see themselves other than in performances,” Kellman said.

As the chairwoman of the event’s committee, Kellman pushed to have more student inclusion and sent out an application for a student speaker who would fit into the year’s theme: Activism and Agency for the Future. The speaker is tasked with presenting the celebration speaker, Hill. At previous celebrations, this job was normally reserved for the chairperson of the celebration.

Danielle Reed, a senior with a double major in Spanish language, literature and culture and African-American studies, was chosen to be the student speaker at the event.

Reed said when she received the email with the application that applying was a “no brainer.”

Reed said she has been following Hill on Twitter for years. She said he was one of the first Twitter activists that inspired her and showed her that one can be an activist through Twitter and still be present in the movement.

When she looked up his biography she found even more connections with him that were synonymous with what she was doing, she said.

“It was perfect; literally it had to be me,” Reed said. “… There is nobody else I can think of who is more perfect to embody all of the things that I want to do and the path that I am on than Marc Lamont Hill.”

Reed applied while she was studying abroad in Spain. She waited about a week for the response to come in and when she first checked her email after arriving in the U.S. from Spain she saw that she had gotten a reply.

Once Reed realized that she had been chosen as the student speaker she got to work on figuring out what statement it was that she wanted to make. She has attended every MLK Celebration since her freshman year. For inspiration for her speech, she said she looked back at the speakers for those events and thought about which ones were the most powerful and spoke the most to her.

It took Reed a full day to perfect the final speech, she said.

She decided that in the midst of the presidential election she wanted to address some issues that Hill and her have in common, especially those that are affecting communities of color. Reed said she thinks these issues need to be put on the forefront of America’s mind.

“I will definitely address a few very controversial topics that have been in the news recently and internationally,” Reed said.

The evening program, during which Reed will speak, will be free and open to the public. It is expected that about 2,000 people will attend the celebration, Kellman said.

Tickets for the dinner are $15 for students — who can also opt to instead use a meal swipe — and $30 for university faculty and staff and the general public.

 

Published on January 27, 2016 at 11:42 pm

Contact Stacy: sfern100@syr.edu | @StacyFernandezB