By DANIELLE RAY | dray@sentinelandenterprise.com | Sentinel & Enterprise
PUBLISHED: January 18, 2024 at 4:11 a.m. | UPDATED: January 18, 2024 at 11:36 a.m.
The 25th annual Montachusett MLK Coalition (MMLKC) Martin Luther King Jr. celebration was held on Jan. 15 at the senior center.
Several community members spoke at the event led by emcee Rev. Annie Belmer including MMLKC President Linda Mason, Mayor Sam Squailia, Fitchburg High School students, local politicians, and keynote speaker Rev. Dr. Susan Suchocki Brown, the MMLKC founder, among others.
Squailia called King Jr. a “visionary leader” and said, “his legacy of justice, equality, and unity continues to inspire us, and we come together as a community to reflect on the values that he has championed.”
Brown spoke about being a founding member of the coalition that was brought to life by many people as a way to “honor and remember the life the legacy and the lessons of Dr. King.”
“I am painfully aware that my struggles are nothing like those persons who grew up black, brown, and red skinned or who came from other countries or other religious backgrounds or marginalized communities,” Brown said. “But as I began to learn about the original sin of racism that our country was built on, I continued to be perplexed, puzzled, and perturbed. And it took time til I was able to fully acknowledge the ravages racism has taken on people and on our society. I was preprogramed to not see.”
She went on to say that “we are right in the middle of a huge and powerful and dangerous backlash.”
“If we don’t come together as allies and learn how to be accountable to and with one another, our very lives and the ideals of democracy will be taken away,” Brown said.
The three FHS students – senior Zoe Graham, sophomore Iyanna Louis, and senior Madison Perron – are members of the high school’s Black Student Union. They received enthusiastic applause for each of their moving speeches about what Martin Luther King Jr. Day means to them.
“Martin Luther King Jr. Day to me is not just a day off from school or another plain old holiday celebrating a person in history who isn’t really worth celebrating. To me, MLK day is so much more than that,” Graham said. “This day is one of the few days in the year that African Americans and other black folks within the diaspora can celebrate a person in our history who genuinely fought for our rights and did it in such a positive and inspiring way. MLK is and forever will be an inspiration to me because he was about protesting and standing up for what you believe is fair in the most peaceful of ways.”
Louis said that to her, Martin Luther King Jr. Day “is a day to represent my freedom and the freedom of my family.” She conveyed that her mother, who grew up on Los Angeles, “is this incredible woman who blesses me every single day and shows me the freedoms that I’ve been granted in this area.”
“Her grandmother grew up in redlining cities where they forced black people into communities where they weren’t allowed to escape because they were buried in so much debt,” Louis said. “Martin Luther King Day is a day where I get to show and represent the struggles and the beauty of being a black person because being black is this incredible experience that can’t be described in words or in stories or in poems. It is something so extraordinary and through all this struggle, through all the speeches and all the marches, and through the peace and the riot, black people have made this moment so incredible.”
Perron echoed her sentiments, saying that Martin Luther King Jr. Day “is much more than a day, it marks the significant steps to positive exposure to our fight, our battle.”
“Growing up I knew next to nothing about this man and his contributions to our culture and our movements, and as I grew into myself and my community, I also grew in the knowledge of his legacy,” she said.
FITCHBURG PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE NEWS 