West Hartford held the annual ceremony on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, with speakers reflecting on the life on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the awarding of the inaugural Earl Exum Servant Leader award.

By Ronni Newton 

One of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most inspiring quotations served as the theme for Monday’s 29th annual celebration of the late civil rights leader’s life, as the standing-room only audience in West Hartford’s Town Hall auditorium heard messages about resiliency from students, officials, and others in the community.

“If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl; but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward,” were the inspiring words spoken by King during his “Keep Moving From This Mountain” speech given at Spelman College in 1960, and on Monday, speakers in West Hartford spoke of the work that still needs to be done in the quest for equality, noting that doing even small things will make a difference.

“This is a time of change in our country,” said Mayor Shari Cantor as she welcomed attendees to the annual ceremony taking place on what was also Inauguration Day. “Optimism is a blind kind of feeling that things are going to get better,” she said. “Hope is an action. Hope is trying to make things better,” and that’s how change happens.

“The time is always right to do what is right,” is another of King’s famous quotations, and those “right” things, Cantor said, don’t have to be major undertakings but can be small actions done in a great way.

LaToya Yagaloff, a member of the West Hartford Board of Education, served as emcee of Monday’s ceremony, and as she introduced the students whose participated in the event – through song and word – she noted the importance of youth. “There was a time we used to tell the youth, ‘You lead the movement and we will follow you,'” she said. “And I think we realized that it’s actually that we need to walk shoulder to shoulder with them … we’re standing in the fight with you.”

Each year, students from West Hartford’s public high schools are selected to offer their perspectives, and this year Asha Comiso of Conard High School and Maxwell St. Arromand of Hall High School, who split his time with fellow Hall student Faith Wada.

Comiso highlighted several important milestones in the civil rights movement that have taken place over the past 60 years. “Yet so much has stayed the same. The fight for justice and equality is never ending,” she said.

Public transportation and schools can no longer legally be segregated, and the right to vote can no longer be denied based on race, she said, although a disproportionate number of African Americans cannot vote in many states due to felony disenfranchisement. 

“But although we are past the days of legal segregation, racism still exists, subtler at times, but just as impactful. Discrimination is apparent in every single town and city in America,” she said. “Dr. King accomplished so much throughout his life and the work he started remains unfinished.”

Even in West Hartford, students utter racial slurs, discriminatory housing practices were part of the town’s history, slavery once existed and until a few years ago the town green was named for a former slave owner, Comiso said.

“I have a challenge for you today. I believe that change, no matter how small, is a step in the right direction. As an individual, how can you effect change? It does not have to be very public or on a large scale. Call out microaggressions, challenge stereotypes, educate yourself further. Do not be ignorant,” she urged. “The word ignorant suggests innocence, but there is no innocence in racism. Right now we are entering a time where people may lose the very rights we have fought hard for. So every conversation, every letter written, every time you just show up for a cause makes a difference. What action will you commit to today?”

In her speech, Wada said that King’s unfaltering resilience is sometimes overlooked. “To be met with a country repulsed by your very existence, yet to refuse hatred or resentment and instead embrace a sense of duty – that is the true measure of his strength. Dr. King transformed his struggle into purpose, lifting others from the grip of racism.”

King knew that the path forward was about responding to, rather than avoiding challenges.

“Even now, his spirit of resilience guides us. When we face trials, we have two choices: to give in to hopelessness or to follow Dr. King’s example and confront those challenges with unwavering determination. He taught us that hope is not passive optimism but the courage to act in moments of despair,” Wada said.

The arc of the universe that bends toward moral justice bends that way because of the hands that pull it, she said.

Taking the podium, St. Arromand continued the message of resilience. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy,” he said, quoting King. “These words carry a truth we need now more than ever, especially on a day like today,” he added.

King’s resilience “allowed him to thrive among the most heinous conditions,” St. Arromand said. “King reminds us that change is not only possible, but necessary. And to attain the America spoken of in the pledge every day, we must embody his courage and vision in everything we do.”

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said King was inspired by his time in Connecticut, where he worked in the tobacco fields as a teenager. He saw that white and Black people could sit together in church, eat in the same restaurants, and sit in the same train cars. He later returned to Connecticut to encourage college students to volunteer in the civil rights movement.

“And so we celebrate him today, we celebrate the work that he did, but as our students have so pointedly reminded us, there is so much more to do,” Bysiewicz said.

And on a day that the new president is being sworn in, she said, Gov. Lamont is in Washington, wishing the new president well, “because we are all in this together and our collective success depends on this leadership. And all of us are called upon to be part of our community’s leadership, our state’s leadership, and our country’s leadership.”

Bysiewicz also mentioned some of the people – women – not often named in the celebration of Martin Luther King’s legacy. Ella Baker, Dorothy Heights, Constance Baker Motley, and Kings’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who continued his legacy. “I wanted to mention those women because they were in the church basements, on the buses, in the marches, in the streets, helping Dr. King to achieve his goals and setting in motion the civil rights movement in our country,” she said.

The challenge, she said quoting King, “is to move out of the mountain, the physical violence and corroding hatred, to a higher and noble mountain of nonviolence and creative, powerful love. This is the challenge standing before our nation and our world,” Bysiewicz said, “and indeed it is.”

Before the keynote address, the first ever Earl Exum Servant Leader award was presented to Mark Walker, who was chosen by the MLK committee from among many nominations. Walker is a retired banker who is currently a pastor with Open Arms Christian Ministries and a youth sports coach with On The Court.

Earl Exum was a beloved and devoted member of the community who died unexpectedly on Oct. 1, 2023 at age 55. He had been president of WHAASCO (the West Hartford African American Social and Cultural Organization), and involved in countless efforts to make the community a better place.

Walker, currently the chair of The Mercy Community’s Board of Directors, has held leadership positions with many other local organizations, including the West Hartford Chamber of Commerce, the Foundation for West Hartford Public Schools, West Hartford Public Television (now West Hartford Community Interactive), and the Smith School PTO.

“He embraces and advances our mission to serve as a ‘compassionate and transforming healing presence’ adhering to core values of reverence, commitment to those experiencing poverty, safety, justice, stewardship, and integrity,” said Christine Looby, executive director of The Mercy Community of McAuley, in her nomination of Walker for the award. “Mark’s gentle guidance, firm convictions, and genuine desire to leave his community better than he found it makes him an ideal candidate for the Earl Exum Servant Leader Award.”

Walker, a West Hartford native and Conard High School graduate, was presented with a proclamation by Cantor. He told the audience that, “To be able to give back to the community where I grew up is truly such an honor,” he said, expressing his thanks.

Kaleea Alston-Griffin, president of the West Hartford African American Social & Cultural Organization, introduced the keynote speaker, John Mills, “a trained genealogist, independent scholar, a descendant of the enslaved, and president of the Alex Breanne Corporation, a Connecticut-based nonprofit,” she said. “The Alex Breanne Corporation focuses on research, interrogation, and presentation of lesser-known stories representing the life experiences of the American enslaved, presented from an African American perspective. Mills unearths little-known people, intending to inject them into the landscape of the communities where they lived, worked, or died. Mills’ goal is to remember the forgotten, as well as to apply critical thinking to our history as a means to find solutions to the many ripple effects today.”

“I’m  incredibly inspired by what the young people here said today, because at their age I didn’t have the same level of insight about the times I was living,” Mills said.

He spoke of growing up in California with a “front row seat” to the Black Power movement, and the long battle to get Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday recognized nationally as a holiday, which finally happened in 1983. “And then after its passing, a new challenge began,” he said, passage by the states. Five states initially combined it with a celebration of figures from the confederacy like Robert E. Lee – and Alabama and Mississippi still do. Many corporations still do not recognize the holiday.

“So this has been a journey. This isn’t something that just came … this has been a 30-plus-year journey for us to be standing here today,” he said. “I say all of this so we don’t forget … this is the product of endurance, resilience, of many people who are no longer with us. Many those people are no longer with us, they are in the shadows.

His work is to change the narrative, to recognize that the people “in the shadows,” even if they were enslaved, were contributors. “We want them to be seen from a place of reverence.”

Mills said his grandfather was from Texas, and armed with his death certificate in 2003 he went with his sister to the cemetery to find the final resting places of his ancestors, including his grandfather’s grandfather, who was formerly enslaved. But their names could not be found in the beautiful and manicured cemetery, until he had given up and was leaving and saw a path, outside the cemetery’s fence, leading into the woods. “The thing is, this is a segregated cemetery,” Mills said, as he found his ancestors, and began to process his history.

“What kind of strength does it take to put up with societal inequity in all that you see, yet still persist on the path of building the esteem of your children as they are exposed to the same messaging, all while remaining faithful,” Mills said. “I present to you, that’s got to be the definition of grace,” he said. “Everything you see is a reflection of that which you do not see.”

After King’s death, his grandfather didn’t stop his service to the community. “We all can follow today’s theme  … And even if it’s in the shadows it’s still valid, because it’s the collective that creates change.”

Rev. Dr. Adam Robersmith of the Universalist Church of West Hartford delivered the invocation. The Conard High School Jazz Combo provided a musical prelude, and musical interludes included a group sing of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” led by the Hall Choraliers, and “This Little Light of Mine” sung by the Bristow Middle School’s Voices of Bristow.

As is customary, the choirs combined, with the audience, for a rousing rendition of “We Shall Overcome” to end the ceremony.

The entire ceremony can be viewed on the West Hartford Community Interactive YouTube channel.

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