On the front page...
NIH’s 35th annual observance of the life
and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., transformed
Masur Auditorium into a window on history with a bold
perspective by Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the
King Research and Education Institute at Stanford
University.
The Jan. 17 program, titled “Remember!
Celebrate! Act!” honored what would have been King’s
77th birthday with song, image and story — only this
time, what might have been routine became a compelling
seminar, the sort of class students vie to attend as
they crowd around their favorite professor.
Continued...
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Dr. Clayborne Carson
of Stanford University gives King keynote
address. |
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“Remember Rosa Parks,” said Carson, emerging from
behind the lectern and walking to center stage, where,
speaking without notes, he set the audience at ease with
his gentle, courtly manner.
Then came the bracing follow-up: “If not for the
actions of Rosa Parks, Dr. King would’ve been a
wonderful minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
but we wouldn’t be talking about him today. And without
Coretta Scott King, there would be no King holiday, no
King papers nor King Institute.”
Carson, professor of history at Stanford University,
was tapped by Mrs. King to edit Dr. King’s papers. He
now directs the project and the recently established
King Institute, which is raising an endowment to ensure
that the project’s efforts continue in perpetuity.
“King didn’t do it alone,” Carson reminded his
listeners, recalling how the civil rights movement’s
genesis in the Montgomery bus boycott had been planned
by women such as Parks, a long-time NAACP worker and
secretary of its local chapter. Her refusal to give up
her seat was not spontaneous, but rather a
well-orchestrated tactic leading to a test case
challenging transit segregation. “And then the women
decided they needed a leader — that is, a man,” he noted
wryly — implying that, in the 1950s, any woman, however
capable, would have been rejected for such a powerful
role.
The audience nodded and murmured in assent as Carson
sketched out an argument that differed somewhat from the
“Great Man” theory of history. In focusing on community
struggle, he credited the women who spearheaded and
maintained the movement.
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Guest speaker Carson
(l) visits with attendees following the MLK
program in Masur Auditorium. |
And who also benefited from that struggle. “Women
don’t always recognize that the 1964 Civil Rights Act
affected more non-black people — that is, women of other
races — than blacks,” the professor stated.
Indeed, there in evidence was Dr. Ruth Kirschstein,
senior advisor to the NIH director, whose introductory
remarks recalled her medical school days at Tulane in
then-segregated New Orleans. In solidarity with blacks
forced to sit behind buses’ color barriers, she never
sat down on a city bus during her years as a student
there.
“My classmates thought I was crazy,” she quipped,
“but it made me turn to a course that I have followed
here in Bethesda for the last 50 years.”
As director of the National Institute of General
Medical Sciences from 1974 to 1993, Kirschstein was the
first woman institute director at NIH. As prelude to the
keynote address, her opening remarks traced how
affirmative action advanced the standing of blacks and
women at NIH as it established its EEO program, the
Office of Research on Women’s Health, the Office of
Research on Minority Health and the National Center on
Minority Health and Health Disparities.
Meanwhile, in accompaniment, a slide show ran scenes
from King’s life. It was a poignant reminder of how
young and audacious he was — at 26, as the new minister
in the city of Montgomery, and with no experience in
civil rights leadership, he began his “Call to
Conscience.”
Even so, Carson asserted, King was not only a civil
rights reformer. “It was not just about riding in the
front of the bus,” he said, “but about being part of
anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia.” He noted
that King went to the Ghanaian independence ceremony as
the
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Stanford’s Carson
makes a point during his lecture. |
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personal
guest of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of modern Ghana
and one of the most influential Pan-Africanists of the
20th century.
Carson then urged listeners to investigate for
themselves how colonialism, Jim Crow and apartheid were
vanquished. His hint: “Young people,” he said, “were
crucial.
“The Birmingham movement was a children’s crusade
because King was already in prison,” he said. “The
uprising in Soweto, South Africa, was launched by
teenagers; Nelson Mandela was in prison.”
From this international perspective, Carson urged his
audience to action by quoting one of King’s sermons
given the year before he was assassinated: “If you take
a stand for that which is right, you will never go
alone.”
So now, asked the professor, what entrenched social
evils in the world are young people of the twenty-first
century going to fight? “Are they going to eliminate
poverty? Will health care be distributed only to those
who have money?”
Speaking to his audience at NIH, those dedicated to
“medicine for the public,” he couldn’t have asked for a
better reception.