North Central College celebrates King with prayer breakfast
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Rev. Tracy Smith Malone urged her audience Monday at North Central College’s annual Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. prayer breakfast to repeat two words: transformed nonconformist.
Those words form the title of a 1954 King sermon championing social activism in a time of complacency.
“We are called to be a people of conviction, not conformity,” Malone told a crowd of about 200 on the Naperville campus. “Of moral nobility, not social respectability.”
Malone, the Chicago southern district superintendent of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church and a North Central graduate, criticized portraying the slain civil rights leader as a dreamer, a depiction that often touts his “I Have a Dream” speech and ignores his indictment against American militarism, corporate greed and oppression.
“Why is it that the struggle against those evil triplets that he speaks about have not existed as part of his enduring legacy?” Malone asked. “Why do we feel the need to sanitize his legacy?”
Perhaps, Malone offered, “We really want to believe his dreams have already become a reality.”
But Malone argued King’s struggle for economic justice remains a part of his unfinished agenda. When she recalls King, Malone said she remembers his Poor People’s Campaign and his efforts for the rights of Memphis sanitation workers.
“We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,” said Malone, echoing King’s call.
Malone’s speech at the prayer breakfast garnered a standing ovation and marked the first event in a weeklong observance of the civil rights leader on the Naperville campus.
Jerome Spearman, a 1973 alumnus, counted this year’s event as his 14th prayer breakfast. It’s the highlight of a week designed to motivate students and members of the community to continue King’s mission, the Naperville man said.
“The inspiration, the drive is still there,” Spearman, 60, said.
North Central College senior John Howard, 22, said Malone’s message inspired him to reflect on the ethics of the “evil triplets” and his responsibility for social activism.
“It got me to think of the different opportunities I have for change,” said Howard, a member of the college’s black student association.
The week continues with a film screening and discussion of “Suffering to Speak,” an episode of “The Tavis Smiley Show,” at noon Tuesday in Smith Hall at Old Main, 30 N. Brainard Street.
Smiley will present the keynote address at 7 p.m. Thursday in Pfeiffer Hall, 310 E. Benton Ave. Tickets are $10 and available by calling (630) 637-7469.
Elsewhere in DuPage, a breakfast sponsored by College of DuPage and Benedictine University featured an address by author Mawi Asgedom, who fled civil war in Ethiopia and survived a Sudanese refugee camp before graduating from Wheaton North High School and Harvard University.
Asgedom tried to identify King’s place in American culture.
“Dr. King represented the very best of what our country has to offer, what we work for, what direction we like to move in,” Asgedom told a crowd of more than 500 people at Benedictine’s Krasa Student Center.
“He is an important part of our cultural heritage, our cultural landscape, everything we believe to be beautiful and amazing about our county — freedom, liberty and people of all races and backgrounds breaking bread together.”
Tonight at Elmhurst College, the 22nd annual DuPage County celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day will feature a worship service and performance by the gospel choir of Lisle-based DuPage AME Church.
