MLK Celebrations

Dear Friends, 

Every year, the Fairfield University community gathers to celebrate the life, message, and legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Given our current context of sickness and death, intractable political polarization and social division, unconscionable poverty and inequality, a reassertion of white supremacy, and ongoing segregation, racist police violence, mistrust, misinformation, and despair, Dr. King’s message of hope, love, unity, and justice remain as relevant and urgent as ever before. This year, the MLK Committee asks the Fairfield University community to consider the challenges of building what Dr. King called the Beloved Community on our campus, in our local communities, and around our nation and our planet. Dr. King’s Beloved Community is not some mushy, idealistic notion of brotherhood and unity that asks us to keep quiet in the face of injustice. It calls for an insistence on truth and a radical understanding of love. 

When Dr. King spoke of love as the solution to hate and to racial injustice, he did not speak of romantic love, nor of the love between friends and families. He spoke instead of agape, a non-reciprocal form of love that insists on recognizing the humanity and dignity of others, even if they refuse to do the same to you. He understood that racism degrades the human spirit and warps the conscience, and that that its perpetrators and beneficiaries were also its victims. Dr. King rejected zero-sum understandings of political competition: justice did not come about from the conquest of adversaries, or from one group dominating another, but by creating the conditions for reconciliation and redemption. 

The building of the Beloved Community is thus hard work that calls for understanding, fortitude and persistence in the face of opposition and backlash. This past year’s unprecedented protests and civil disobedience demanding racial justice, and the myriad everyday actions of activists and others across our country and planet, carry Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community with us, as we look to our future at this critical juncture in history. 

Please join us in celebrating Black History Month and recommitting ourselves to Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community. Our annual Convocation will be held virtually on February 22^nd at 7:00pm. Even though we cannot meet in person, it is more important than ever to gather for this calling of community to renew our collective commitment to social justice.

This year’s celebrations also include a seminar on February 23^rd for faculty and staff with the Convocation speaker, Professor Cristina Beltrán, a discussion on February 25^th focused on Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, our annual youth leadership summit, and a student panel on March 5^th convened by the Black Student Union and the Honors Book Club. 

We invite you all to visit and bookmark our website. There you will find a schedule of events, an interview with Professor Beltrán, links to her writings, and, in the coming weeks, videos recognizing this year’s Vision Award Winners and student groups working for social justice on our campus and in our communities. The website is in the process of being updated, so please check back again and contact us directly if you have any questions about any of the MLK programming. 

https://www.fairfield.edu/mlk/

Pejay Lucky & Sunil Purushotham

Co-Chairs, MLK Committee