MLK Celebration Revels In The Words Of Kings

On Monday, Probate Judge Clifton Graves had a story to tell about the time he met Martin Luther King, Jr.

But before that, he had a story to tell about an eagle who thought he was a chicken.

Graves’s story was part of the days-long celebration marking the 25th annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s Legacy of Social and Environmental Justice, presented by the Yale Peabody Museum and Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

In years past the schedule of events ranged from the Peabody to the New Haven Museum to other nearby buildings. This year the organizers made it virtual, even to the point of recreating the same feeling that so much was going on that, in the best sense, a celebration-goer couldn’t quite see all of it.

There were talks and panel discussions. The annual poetry slam in honor of Zannette Lewis — usually a raucous live event — was converted to a virtual poetry jam. The Artsucation Academy Network presented a dance performance choreographed and directed by Ms. Hanan Hameen and featuring Neighborhood Music School’s Premiere Dance Company, Keepers of the Culture Performing Arts Company, and M’Bosse Dance Company of Senegal. The audience for these events tuned in from New Haven and all over the state of Connecticut, as well as from New York, North Carolina, Alabama, and Senegal.

As in years past, those who attended the festivities online were treated to events that were joyous, yes, but also moving and thought-provoking, as the core of Dr. King’s message felt as relevant as ever.

Amen

Graves was the first performer in a storytelling segment of Monday’s programming — aimed at kids and adults — that also featured Joy Donaldson, Waltrina Kirkland-Mullins, and Dr. Robbie Thomas.

Graves began with the observation that storytelling in the African and African-American tradition was a way to reconnect with the spirituality that gave the strength to ​“move forward” and deal with the ​“the dual pandemic of Covid-19 and 1619.”

He then launched into a reading of ​“The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson, a poem retelling the opening of Genesis that Graves brought to warm, vivid life. He also gave it a modern tweak: When he got to the verse that reads ​“Then God sat down— / On the side of a hill where he could think; / By a deep, wide river he sat down; / With his head in his hands, / God thought and thought, / Till he thought: I’ll make me a man!” Graves added ​“and a woman!” with a soft chuckle. ​“Woman and man became living, breathing souls. Say amen, say amen.”

“African parables and proverbs were passed down to us from the griots,” Graves continued, becoming a lifeline in a world that ​“still denigrates and disrespects us.”

He then began the story of the chicken and the eagle. In it, a chicken farmer finds a stray egg and takes it back to his farm. Two weeks later, ​“life comes out of the egg, and lo and behold, it’s a baby eagle,” Graves said.

“I’m a chicken farmer! I don’t know a doggone thing about raising eagles,” the farmer says. But he does the best he can. He raises, feeds, and talks to the bird like all his others. ​“As he matured into his eagleness, he behaved like a chicken because he was raised as a chicken,” Graves said.

A stranger stops by the farm and sees the eagle among the chickens, acting like a chicken. He asks the farmer what’s going on.

“Even though he looks like an eagle, he has been raised and trained to think he’s a chicken,” the farmer says.

“God made that bird to be an eagle, to fly and soar,” the stranger says. ​“You’re doing the eagle a disservice.”

“But I did the best I could,” the farmer says. ​“And that eagle will always believe he’s a chicken:’

Stranger takes the eagle to the top of a tree.

“Fly, eagle fly,” he says. ​“You were meant to take your rightful place.”

The chicken farmer throws chicken feed on the ground. Instead of soaring into the sky, the eagle flies down to the feed.

The stranger tries the same thing again from the top of the barn, with the same results.

“No matter what you do, no matter what you try, that eagle will always believe he’s a chicken and behave accordingly,” the farmer says.

“Maybe I need to take him out of this environment,” Graves related the stranger as thinking, to a place ​“where he can learn to be an eagle.”

So the stranger blindfolds the eagle and takes him up to the mountains, ​“where eagles learn to be eagles.”

Day in and day out, the stranger tells the eagle, ​“there’s nothing wrong with being a chicken, but you were made and built and designed to be an eagle.”

At last the ​“day of reckoning” comes. The stranger takes the eagle to a mountaintop.

“Fly, eagle, fly. God made you to fly and soar and take your rightful place,” the stranger says. He throws the eagle off his arm. The eagle at first falls. Then — for the first time in his life — he stretches his wings.

“He began to feel he could truly fly,” Graves said. The eagle flies back to the top of the mountain and thanks the stranger. Then flies over the farm. ​“He could truly fly and truly soar,” Graves said.

“What does this have to say to us?” Graves asked of the story.

“Especially for young people of color,” but ​“to everybody,” he said, ​“there are far too many who feel they’re just chickens. We’re raised to be chickens.” Our social institutions, from education to law enforcement, ​“have a tendency to categorize us as chickens.” And ​“what do we do with chickens? We put them in pens.” Same as for children, he said, his warm tone sharpening a little. We put them in ​“pens — penitentiaries. The school-to-jail pipeline.”

‘Our task, our challenge, in 2021, as we honor once again he life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,” Graves continued, is to recognize that ​“most of our children are eagles pent up in chicken bodies. And so we have to figure out a way to pull the eagle out of our children.” Because eagles, he said, become engineers, teachers, business leaders, senators, vice presidents, presidents. ​“The sky’s the limit,” he said. ​“Don’t let society pigeon-hole — or chicken-hole — you. That’s the parable. Strive to be, and instill in your children, the eagleness. Be the best you can be. Do the best you can do.”

Graves said he learned that lesson from his own parents, when he was growing up in Winston-Salem, N.C. As a children he experienced segregation firsthand — separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms. ​“I lived it,” he said.

One day, when he was 9 years old, his churchgoing parents ​“had the vision and foresight to say ​‘there’s a speaker from Georgia coming and you need to hear him.” The church was ​“packed full of people — Black and White,” he said. It was standing room only for adults; the only seat he could find was on the piano stool by the pulpit, ​“the best seat in the house.”

Dr. King was ​“just starting to get a national reputation” when he visited the church that evening, Graves said. But he was already an electrifying speaker. ​“Even though I was nine years old, I distinctly remember him saying, ​‘strive to be the best you can be. If you can’t be a tree, be a bush. If you can’t be the moon, be a star…. Prepare yourself ow for the future. Study hard every day. Be the best you can be every day.”

“In their wisdom again,” Graves’s parents ​“took me up to the pulpit to shake the hand” of Martin Luther King, Jr. ​“He looked me in the eye,” Graves said. ​“Not many people are alive who can tell that story.” And, he continued, ​“I’m mindful of how that day, hearing him speak, has influenced me and motivated me and inspired me to this very day, just as my parents motivated me.” That motivation took him to Tufts for college and to Georgetown for law school. He served under four different mayors in New Haven and is now a probate judge. ​“I owe that again to a legacy of striving to be an eagle, the motivation instilled in me.”

“That’s why this weekend is so important to me,” Graves said. ​“Be the change that you seek. Be the best you can be. Be that eagle, and live up to the legacy of Dr. King.”

He finished with the words of Frederick Douglass. Records suggest he was a ​“great orator,” Graves said. ​“Many people compare him to Dr. King. But his words more than his oratory speak to us today.”

He quoted from Douglass then: ​“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Graves paused. ​“Amen,” he concluded. ​“The words of Frederick Douglass.”

Hitting The Books

Graves’s story found a common theme with that of a panel discussion called ​“Social Injustices: Black Librarians as Change Agents.” To a large virtual audience, members of the Connecticut affiliate of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association used quotes and thoughts of Dr. King as a starting point to talk about the principles that guide then as information specialists. In doing so, they revealed libraries as more than just repositories of information, but as community hubs, places that are there to help.

“We are the Black librarians who have given away many books” at the Peabody in the past, explained Astoria Ridley, from the New Haven Law Library in the New Haven Courthouse. ​“Today a few of our members will share their social justice perspectives.”

The librarians began by talking about economic justice. ​“As a people we have to keep moving forward,” Ridley said, emphasizing the importance of working for progress incrementally as well as working for breakthroughs. ​“If you can’t fly then run. If you can’t run then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl,” she said. Though Vivian Bordeaux, from Bridgeport Public Library, pointed out the systemic issues that progress on social issues faced. ​“It is a crime,” she said, for people to be paid ​“starvation wages” in a country as wealthy as the United States. ​“Equality demands dignity, and dignity demands a job and paycheck that lasts more than a week.”

The panel moved to the theme of Black self-love, responding to a quote from Dr. King that ​“an individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” Or, as Ridley put it, ​“we are not independent. We are interdependent.” For the librarians on the panel, the kind of rising above Dr. King talked about was rooted in love. According to Robert Kinney of the Connecticut State Library, that began with love and respect for oneself. Elise Browne, from the J. Eugene Smith Library at Eastern Connecticut State University stressed the importance of education. ​“That is love of the family,” she said; Black people ​“are all in the same boat, still fighting to overcome systemic racism, still trying to entire equal opportunity, and trying to teach our children are values and cultural heritage.” Dr. King emphasize how ​“becoming intelligent is part of the development of your character. In schools we should be learning how to think critically — not what to think, but how to think.”

An audience member asked how Black librarians could address social injustices. ​“We’re information specialists,” Bordeaux said. ​“What we try to do is to share whatever information we have with those in the community we provide services to. We’re learning as we share that information.”

“Librarians are educators,” Browne said. ​“We foster curiosity. We supply the materials when people are searching for something. We’re aware of the resources that are vastly available in libraries and other institutions. We really want to empower communities with all the resources we have at our disposal. It’s our energy and our mission.”

This turned the panel to the ethics that motivated their actions. ​“You have to have morals because you have to know how to treat people and how to treat yourself,” Ridley said. ​“It’s not just being smart. Anyone can be smart. It’s how you use your education. As librarians we are continuously encouraging people that they can do it.” At the law library in the New Haven courthouse, where she works, ​“there is so much help we give patrons to represent themselves,” she said. ​“It’s our job to make sure people are feeling good about themselves and confident. But you got to want to read.”

Bordeaux agreed that the librarians’ mission lay in ​“empowering the communities we serve by sharing our resources.” She emphasized that ​“the majority of the resources we have are free” — books and e‑books, which were becoming more diverse, representing a wider array of perspectives, all the time.

On the theme of environmental justice, the panel began with a quote from Dr. King that ​“lightning makes no sound until it strikes.”

“We’ve done so much to hurt the environment,” Browne said. ​“I think we all need to encourage each other to do what we can. Think about what you do with waste material. Do you compost?… If you have trash, you don’t throw it on the ground. You carry it until you get to the trash can. We all have a role to play in improving the environment. For the justice to occur, it has to occur in communities all around. We can make our own community cleaner by setting an example. Don’t let your nephew through that paper out the car window.”

An audience member asked if the librarians could recommend any specific techniques — or if they had stories to share — regarding the furthering of social justice through their work. Kinney recalled a time earlier in his career, working in a branch library.

“There was a family that was in need of food. We came together and were able to support that family,” Kinney said. The family’s kids came into the library all the time. ​“My director allowed me to reach out to this family and provide some assistance.”

Browne similarly recalled working in a branch library in a primarily Spanish-speaking neighborhood. Parents came in with their children, ​“new to the area in Hartford.” She worked with community workers to put together a tour of the library in Spanish, which ​“is not my first language,” she said. The families ​“were pleased to see me struggle with Spanish as they struggled with English” — and they encouraged her just as she encouraged them.

From the Wilson Branch Library in the Hill to the Bridgeport library where she worked, Bordeaux said, ​“there are different community libraries that have opened their doors. They have provided spaces for children … spaces and services provided for those who are looking for it. It’s free and we’re there.” She mentioned that ​“we do also go out,” through bookmobiles and school programs. ​“We go out and we enjoy doing it. We really enjoy doing it.” Browne mentioned that, at a farmer’s market, she saw ​“the bookmobile was distributing not just books, but cans of soup … not just information, but things people can really use.”

The pandemic has made it much more difficult for patrons to go to the library, and librarians, like many institutions, were still wrestling with the digital divide. But Browne exhorted the audience to still ​“use your library because it will take you so far.”

“Thank you!” one audience member typed in the meeting’s chat box. ​“The library was my favorite place growing up and still is today. Thank you all for what you do.”