Rivers Celebrates Martin Luther King With Assembly, Service Day

 

The 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. Assembly was a particularly memorable one thanks to guest speaker Clint Smith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and a renowned spoken word poet. Mr. Smith’s poems detailed his childhood in New Orleans, his years working with underprivileged youth as a teacher in Prince George County, Maryland; and the realities of being a black man in America today.

 

His poem, “How to Raise a Black Son in America,” has over 1.5 million views and describes the way black parents are forced to educate and prepare their sons for how the world will respond to them.

 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the pedagogy of black parenting, especially over the last two years,” Smith said. “My mother and father had to raise me and prepare me for a world that was often taught to fear me. I didn’t understand that as a kid – I grew up in a mixed-race, mixed-income community – so this idea that my father had to talk to me about how I couldn’t do some of the same things as my white friends because of the history of this country and the biases people carry was very frustrating for me. They almost had to strip away parts of my childhood to ensure that I would come home at night.”

 

Click here to watch Clint Smith’s performance of “How to Raise a Black Son in America” and click here to watch him perform a poem about his father, entitled “My Father is an Oyster.”

 

On Monday, January 18 a group of Rivers students honored the legacy of Dr. King by taking part in a service day. The students travelled to Brandeis University for a full-day program with the Massachusetts Service Alliance. In the morning, they packaged meals for food-insecure families – an effort that yielded more than 14,000 meals – and for the afternoon, students explored an educational justice fair with workshops about homelessness, racial justice, food security, and multi-faith dialogue.

 

Organizing this service day was Rivers Serves, a club that provides service opportunities throughout the year that go above and beyond the graduation requirement.