Martin Luther King Jr. had an incredibly influential and powerful life that deserves to be celebrated, and here at Kent we try very hard to do him justice with our full MLK week of service opportunities, chapel offerings, and campus celebrations. The Kent School community has Adwoa Baffoe-Bonnie ‘17 and Hazel Garrity ‘17 as well as Mrs. Megan Sokolnicki to thank for playing such an influential role in organization and execution of this week.

As far as community service activities one could choose to Volunteer at the Kent Food Bank, the Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen, with a local kindergarten basketball team, or at the Little Guild of St. Francis Animal Shelter.

At lunch, there are numerous activities going on as well. You can make weekend backpack bags for needy children, or make bag lunches for the homeless. There are also campaigns for organizations such as Sandy Hook Promise and Habitat for Humanity. We also have a Free Rice competition going on in which students answer questions, and for each correct 10 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Programme.

The movies Selma and Hidden Figures are also being shown. The former is about the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition, and the latter about a team of African-American women who provide NASA with important data needed to launch the program’s first successful space missions.

In chapel on Tuesday students and teachers spoke and sang about civil rights, and on Thursday we have a celebration of the Civil Rights movement through poetry and song. During both Tuesday and Thursday Chapel various poems about the Civil Rights Movement and race relations were interspersed between musical offerings from Paige Wu ‘18, Ka Yu Wan ‘18, Senior Prefects Callie Celestine ‘17 and Emelia Worth ‘17, and Onyinye Okoli ‘17 and Gabby Cator ‘18.

Mr. Coulombe also gave a powerful Chapel talk which highlighted the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. He said how “in a social movement people can often get caught up in a few key players” and that it is important “to recognize all of the people in previous years who gave people like Dr. King a platform to take action”. His talk celebrated Dr. King, but was also quite honest. Mr. Coulombe admitted that Dr. King’s method of preaching “love and nonviolent protest was a great idea,” but often times wasn’t as effective in getting the message across. He recognized other activist such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, who despite being “disapproved by the white middle-class community for their violent nature, provided a viable and effective method of activism.” Mr. Coulombe has always been interested with the African American experience ever since he was a little boy interacting with black friends. He majored in African American studies and is very passionate about the subject, so he used his knowledge to help further educate the community on the subject.

Dean Kelderman noted that the church plays a larger role in the Civil Rights Movement than people may think. The Episcopal Church actually recognizes Dr. King as one of their saints and Father Voorhees shared a prayer dedicated to him. Dean Kelderman says how Dr. King’s “teachings of love, tolerance, and justice are closely intertwined with Christian ideas” and “that even if one doesn’t consider themselves Christian, there is still a lot of knowledge to gain out of the teachings in the past two services.”

The coordinator of all these events, Mrs. Sokolnicki, who hopes that through these activities, “students will gain a sense of who Dr. King was, and his message to the world. Everyone is familiar with his ‘I have a dream’ speech, but there is so much more to his teachings…the need to stand up to injustice when you see it is one of his most important messages.”