One of my favorite things about the time surrounding winter break each year is the rush of holidays we get to celebrate with family and friends-Christmas, New Year's and one that probably isn't usually at the forefront of people's minds, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For Brandeis, MLK Day is about reflecting on and celebrating our university's heritage of diversity, social justice and activism, and each year student clubs host programs that up the ante in our observance.

Yesterday evening, continuing their celebration of King's life after already hosting a day-long service activity for local middle and high school students, MLK & Friends Club teamed up with Dean of Student Life Jamele Adams and the African and Afro-American Studies department to host a memorial program. Though this is the ninth year that the University has hosted a memorial for King, the programming was, this year as much as ever, dynamic and celebratory, and geared toward facilitating a dialogue about King's teachings.

The memorial, which was fondly called "For the Love of a Dream!" was staged in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater, and every seat in the house was filled far before the program began. As the excited audience settled down, a sound bite played, prefacing the program with the words of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress," the bit began, leading into a warm introduction by Adams. Beginning with Adams, each performer and speaker shared his or her own contribution to the memorial, each with an artistic and sentimental flair that drove home King's message.

Adams began by delivering a slam poem, detailing in no uncertain terms that the society we live in is not, in fact, a post-racial one, and sending the audience into roars of applause and reactionary finger snapping as he chronicled the struggle for civil rights from its earliest origins in the abolitionist movement. "How outside of yourself would you go to get out of your own way?" he slammed toward the end.

Prof. Chad Williams (AAAS), who hosted the rest of the program, took the stage next, reiterating to the audience that King's work "was a fight that he committed his life to, [and] it was a fight that he gave his life to." Williams hyped up the audience for a group of performers returning from a superb performance at last year's memorial program, the Boston Tap Company.

Established in 2007, the group seeks to spread their message of love and positivity through dance, Williams said. Their routine certainly did that-starting off with no music at all, the group's wild and resonant tapping progressed into an exciting choreography to Sam Cook's song "A Change is Gonna Come."

Taking a break from the musical aspect of the program, the first ever cohort of Brandeis Bridges Fellows shared stories of their recent trip to Israel in order to institute an interfaith, intercultural dialogue between black and Jewish students on campus.

Bridges Fellow Makalani Mack '16 took on the song in a heartfelt vocal performance, accompanied by three students on the bass guitar, electric guitar and saxophone. Mack rose from his seat in the audience as the song's tune began playing, and shared how growing up in Atlanta and walking by sites sacred to the Civil Rights Movement as he was growing up, like King's place of burial, inspired him from a young age. During his performance, Dean Adams yelled "sing, sing!" at him, and the rest of the Fellows joined in as they were seated in the audience.

The highlight of the musical program, without a doubt, was keynote speaker Jane Sapp's performances on the piano, playing and singing songs that were sung during King's activism, at protests and rallies, and encouraging the audience to sing along with her. Her husband, keynote speaker Hubert Sapp, said with a surprised smile after her first song that he never knows what she will do.

An absolutely unbelievable evening of music and performances, in addition to a slew of moving spoken-word pieces and orations, many composed of or inspired by the words of King himself, "For the Love of a Dream!" gave the Brandeis community a wonderful opportunity to commemorate the legacy of a man to whom we owe much of the freedom to which we have grown up accustomed.
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