The keynote speaker for the 40th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration was Sarah Willie-LeBreton, a sociologist and president of Smith College. (Photo by Amelia Beamish)
Sarah Willie-LeBreton, president of Smith College, was welcomed back to Syracuse by a stadium filled with nearly 1,200 people for the 40th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Sunday—and she was happy to return to the place she had called home.
“Although I have not lived here for 50 years, Syracuse, the place of my first days, lives in my heart,” she said.
Willie-LeBreton, the keynote speaker for the event held in the JMA Wireless Dome, is the daughter of the late Charles V. Willie G’57, H’92, Syracuse University’s first Black full professor, department chair and vice president. Willie was a classmate of King at Morehouse College and was instrumental in bringing King to the University in 1961 and 1965.
Chancellor Kent Syverud gave the welcoming remarks. (Photo by Angela Ryan)
The University’s Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, the largest of its kind on any college campus, seeks to honor the message and mission of King and is a direct expression of the University’s commitment to advancing academic excellence at a university welcoming to all. This year’s theme was “Living History.”
In his welcoming remarks, Chancellor Kent Syverud noted that many freedoms have been won through the work of King’s contemporaries and those who followed him.
“Challenges and injustices persist, but his message urges us to act,” Chancellor Syverud said. “When he spoke last here in Sims Hall in 1965, he said, ‘The time is always right to do right.’ I think that means now, too.”
During her address, Willie-LeBreton spoke of the transformation of colleges and universities over the past 60 years, and of the good that higher education puts into the public space as the country’s central economic, medical, artistic, intellectual, scientific and public policy engines and most respected export.
“The work of higher education is intertwined with the work in which King was engaged because in the United States, the work of the university campus has always been in generative tension with the work of democracy,” Willie-LeBreton said. “The subjects explored in the university quite literally drive us forward as a species.”
Guests enjoy dinner prior to the program. (Photo by Amelia Beamish)
In current times, she said campuses have been tested. “Those of us who are educators must redouble our efforts to cultivate spaces that are mutually respectful as much as they are sites of rigorous learning,” she says. “We have to be with people who are different from us, and we have to stay in relationship with them.”
Willie-LeBreton offered two ideas for how to honor King’s sacrifice.
First, she said, resist the narratives that assail our educational institutions. “The needs of our schools are great and our goals for them are greater,” she said.
Her second suggestion is to talk with people you might not choose as friends. “Find a neutral place, your public library branch, a cafe, an empty classroom, a diner,” she said. “Bring along two of your friends and two folks you suspect have opinions you don’t share, but with whom you have something in common.”
Willie-LeBreton encouraged the audience to honor education as “our human birthright” and cultivate “dignity by listening carefully to yourself and to others and then honoring what you hear.”
“If we do these things, we will bring fellowship to each other and the world neighborhood of which King spoke,” Willie-LeBreton said. “Take the baton and let’s give this lap our all in the relay race for justice.”
The evening’s program also included performances by the Community Choir and the Black Celestial Choral Ensemble, and the presentation of this year’s Unsung Hero Awards.
The Community Choir performs a selection. The Black Celestial Choral Ensemble also performed during the evening. (Photo by Amelia Beamish)
The 2025 Unsung Hero Award recipients were honored at the event. They included from left to right, Andrea-Rose Oates ’26, James K. Duah-Agyeman, Isaiah Pollard from the SCORE organization and Laurence Segal. Rodney Jackson, far right, accepted a posthumous award on behalf of his brother, Jamie Jackson. (Photo by Amelia Beamish)
