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The 10th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration

On the heels of the election of President Barack Obama, the 10th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration had even more meaning. Obama was compared by some to Dr. King as a way to show the similarities in how they promote peace and unity.

Thursday’s commemorative program packed California State University, Long Beach USU Ballrooms with about 200 faculty, university and high school students.

It’s good to see a good turnout like this because it really shows us coming together and uniting as a people, said Ejiro Okoro, a student at CSULB.

The program consisted of poetry readings; a dramatic presentation by Dr. James Manseau Sauceda, the director of CSULB’s Multicultural Center; a dance presentation and musical selection; and followed with a lecture by keynote speaker Maulana Karenga, a professor of Africana studies.

This year’s theme was “Changing Times, Changing Together: The Dream Lives On”.

The program is “an opportunity for the campus community to come together and celebrate and honor Dr. King for all that he has done for us as a nation and actually for the entire world. It’s CSULB’s tribute to Dr. King,” said Valerie Bordeaux, chair of the MLK Program.

It is especially important to expose grade school students to the MLK program because it enforces the dream that King had envisioned for us, said Phillip Humphreys, director of Upward Bound at CSULB.

“Change is upon us which is our president’s motto and under those lines we ask our students, ‘how can you change things to make it better for you and your families,'” Humphreys said.

I’m really trying to make the coalition between the two men for the students in seeing King’s dream and linking it to Obama’s vision so that the student may come up to rethink their own dreams, said Keion Morgan, a outreach recruitment specialist.

“This was a really good opportunity because MLK was such a great man and with the inauguration of President Obama, it was a monumental opportunity to take part in something so great,” said Sherwin Parker, senior student at CSULB.

“He taught us to value the sacredness of human rights. The equal worth and dignity regardless of race or color. He taught us to love peace and cherish freedom to pursue justice and to struggle and sacrifice to bring them into being,” Karenga said. “He left us not only a world but a challenge to do good in the world. And when he challenges us to do good in the world, he’s not just giving us a dream in the abstract.”

“I thought this was great and very moving,” said Richard Lozano, a graduate student at CSULB. “One of the most important things that I feel about this, of course, was Dr. Martin Luther King’s contributions to a the civil rights movement and what it means today.”

“In this year with this profound transformation in this country, his message becomes even more important because it is not a finished dream it is an unfinished dream that we must now turn our attention to,” Karenga said.

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