Speaking before a capacity crowd in Wittenberg University’s historic Weaver Chapel, poet, educator and essayist Elizabeth Alexander discussed the impact of Martin Luther King in a thoughtful and reflective keynote address for the Witt Series-sponsored Martin Luther King Jr. Day Commemorative Convocation.

Alexander, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, delivered a presentation titled “The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Hopeful Future.” The daughter of a civil rights advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander discussed the fact that King may have led the March on Washington nearly five decades earlier, but the struggle for equality in the United States continues today.

His legacy is on-going, and “it asks something of us,” she said.

“Dr. King’s legacy asks us to commit to our country and our communities and our children and each other,” said Alexander, who read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at the inauguration of President Barack Obama a year earlier, becoming one of just four poets to read at an American presidential inauguration. “He asks us to act in love, to let love guide and unite us and show us not just what we are fighting against, but more importantly what we are fighting for.

“That journey, that meditation, that challenge, is what I think is important for us to commit to today.”

Mae Helen Jackson, class of 2012 from Chicago, Ill., and president of the campus organization Concerned Black Students, introduced Alexander to the Wittenberg audience. She emphasized the importance of poetry and the impact of the written word, a theme echoed during Alexander’s address.

She read a passage of King’s speech in Oslo, Norway, from the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, in addition to a poem written by the late June Jordan, who published 27 books of poetry in her career while teaching at several colleges and universities, including the University of California-Berkeley. There, she founded Poetry for the People, a program that inspires and empowers students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression, in 1991.

Alexander is the first recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American Society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown-v-Board of Education decision of 1954.” She has published five books of poems, including American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.”

She pointed out that while King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is the moment immortalized by history, the March on Washington would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of others, most notably A. Philip Randolph, a labor organizer and civil rights leader. An infant in the crowd with her parents, Alexander does not recall the event, but she understands its on-going impact – the power of the words spoken that day are important even now.

The Wittenberg community salutes Alexander following her keynote address.

“Though we remember Dr. King’s astonishing speech – its unforgettable language, its extraordinary powers of analysis; its invitation to that audience and audiences for years to come to think about and through the problem of visioning a new future; its tough challenges; its sheer beauty – that march was not just about Dr. King and his speech,” said Alexander, who has degrees from Yale and Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University Pennsylvania. “There were extraordinary measures that people took. These people worked pre-fax, pre-cell phone, pre-Twitter, to organize all of those people peacefully in one place. It was a small miracle to have pulled it off.

“And so progress goes – the work of communities of many, though it is sometimes exemplified by the charismatic one who delivers the message.”

Alexander concluded her remarks with an excerpt of “Praise Song for the Day.”

Established in 1990, the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Convocation features an academic procession with faculty in full regalia. The convocation was preceded by a freedom march from the Springfield Art Museum to Wittenberg’s Recitation Hall, where participants took turns reading excerpts from civil rights, human rights and protest speeches. Immediately following the convocation, there was a Unity Luncheon and a question-and-answer session with Alexander.

In addition to the convocation, Wittenberg’s student-run radio station WUSO 89.1-FM broadcasted the entire 13-hour series “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” an award-winning audio history of the civil rights movement in five southern communities, and the Spike Lee movie When the Levees Broke was shown in Post 95, Wittenberg’s casual dining area in the Benham-Pence Student Center, throughout the day.

The Witt Series annually brings distinguished lecturers and performing artists of national and international prominence to the campus and local community. For more information about the Series, visit the university’s Web site. To make special arrangements, reserve a Series poster, or become a friend of the Witt Series, contact Jeannine Fox at (937) 327-7470 or viae-mail.