MLK Scholar Seeks to Inspire Students to Create Change

MLK Day 2025 guest speakers Dr. Robert Thompson and Robert Edwards

On January 20, students participated in an interactive program in celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Guest speaker Gregory Thompson, Ph.D., a Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar, author, and the co-founder and creative director of Voices Underground, led a discussion about how students can become active citizens by following the example of Dr. King and school founder Frederick Gunn.
 

“We were excited for this day to celebrate Dr. King's work and the importance of activism both in our history and our present life,” said Benjamin Kang, Dean of Belonging and Inclusion at Gunn. “As Highlanders, we should always strive to create change and Monday's program was intended to inspire us all.”

Thompson was scheduled to speak alongside Robert Edwards, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in historic preservation from Columbia University and is a Scholar-in-Residence at Voices Underground, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance racial healing by telling the stories of the Underground Railroad through scholarly research, creative experiences, and historical memorialization. Although Edwards was unable to present at Gunn due to illness, he has spent the past several years working with Thompson on an initiative to build a national memorial to the Underground Railroad outside of Philadelphia. Together they specialize in researching the stories of the Underground Railroad and amplifying the voices found in the unique stories tied to our history. 

“This day is really an invitation to you,” Thompson told the students, drawing parallels between King and Mr. Gunn and challenging them to think about how what we believe has the power to shape our lives, and the lives of others.

A former pastor, Thompson holds a master’s and doctorate from the University of Virginia and is the co-author, with the Rev. Duke Kwon, of “Reparations: A Christian Call to Repentance and Repair.” He is also the co-creator and producer of “Union: The Musical,” a soul and hip-hop based musical about the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and in October, became founder and creative director of Convivium, a creative studio that specializes in narrative design, experience design, and impact strategy design.

While there were many differences between King and Mr. Gunn, including when and where they lived, their race, and the focus of their work, Thompson asserted that they lived out of the same story — an emancipationist story — during a time of great political turmoil and polarization in the United States. In Mr. Gunn’s time, the nation went to war over the issue of enslavement, and in MLK’s day, the nation was at war internationally and internally over the issues of integration and civil rights.

“They were both living in a moment when vulnerable populations were having their rights contested and there was massive violence happening. They have that in common,” Thompson said. Yet both believed in the dignity of other people, and inspired by that belief, both were willing to take action and bear suffering for the sake of others, while also nurturing the hope that things could change. 

“Now what I want to ask you is, ‘What story are you living out of? What is the story that is shaping your life, your moral imagination?’” Thompson said, inviting students to discuss in their advisor groups questions such as: What do you believe about human dignity? Where do you see dignity being threatened? What kind of actions do you think you should take? How can we as a community cultivate hope? 

“Gunn and King had to live out of a hope that things could change, clinging to a belief that hate and violence and immaturity and crudeness … will not have the last word, but that something like love, something like justice, something like beauty can actually have the last word in this world. That’s something you have to carry inside of you. The way that Gunn manifested this is he started a school. Education is an act of hope,” Thompson said. “It’s an idea that we are going to invest in you so that things will happen in your life that will outlive us, that we won’t even see, but we believe in this triumph of hope.”

Thompson went on to share a quote from King, from a speech he gave at the National Cathedral in March 1968, which encapsulated the civil rights leader’s commitment to cultivating hope: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

“He said this all the time. That was a commitment that he had,” Thompson said, quoting as well from King’s final speech, given in Memphis in 1968. “He said, ‘We’ve got some difficult days ahead … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.’ And he said, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’ Those were the last public words he ever spoke. We will get there. That’s the cultivation of hope.”

“Part of the work here is to figure out how to say, ‘Wait a minute. I want to cultivate hope.’ I want to be a person who says, ‘Yes, this actually can change. The moral arc of the universe does in fact bend toward justice.’ That’s what Gunn was about, that’s what King was about, and I just want to ask you, is that what you’re about? Is that what you’re going to be about? Because the way you answer that question is going to determine almost everything about your life,” Thompson told the students.

He concluded his talk by sharing a story about King from August 16, 1967. “He steps to the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Seated before him are friends and fellow leaders from around the country. They gathered for the 10th anniversary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They had had three days of celebration. They had this big party in the new Hyatt Hotel in downtown Atlanta, where Aretha Franklin sang and they had all these speeches. Then they had a day of workshops on housing policy, nonviolence, poverty reduction, Vietnam. But now they filled the sanctuary of this historic church and he was going to give an address called, ‘Where Do We Go From here?’ It was a pretty ordinary scene. He was standing in his family’s pulpit, looking over his closest colleagues, speaking on his customary themes. But as he made his way to the pulpit, there was this strange tension in the air, this sense that they were now moving out into the unfamiliar,” Thompson said.

He provided some context, reflecting that, “Starting in 1954, King and that group of people had presided over a series of incredible social triumphs: integration of public transportation, private businesses, and public schools. They did the March on Washington in ‘63, he won the Nobel Prize in ‘64. They passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and then the Voting Rights Act in 1965. They were winning, right? But in early 1965 — this is important for you to know this — that confidence started to fade for King. The protest violence of Selma – some of you have seen the violence on the Selma bridge, some of you have walked that bridge; I have … The collapse of civil rights alliances – there was all this fighting among civil rights activists – the Vietnam War was going on, income inequality in America was on the rise, Black Power had grown, really starting in 1966, as a movement, and people were kind of tired of talking about race.”

“And so, King entered into this crucible, this crisis … from 1965 to 1968 of this unprecedented suffering. He went from being a globally honored Nobel Prize winner in 1964, to in 1967, being described as ‘the most hated man in America.’ He went politically from having the president of the United States as his ally, to being actively persecuted by the FBI. Relationally, he went from being the revered center of this coalition to being basically marginalized and maligned by his former friends. King was really lonely at the end of his life. Vocationally, he went from focusing on race in the South to now thinking about a comprehensive remaking of America. And spiritually, he went from being a person who dreamed of national reconciliation, to a depressed and despondent man who regularly talked about his own death. That’s what happened to King,” Thompson said, explaining that in the midst of that, he walked up to that pulpit in Atlanta and delivered one of the most famous lines of his life: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great of a burden to bear.”

“That’s really what I want to say to you,” Thompson told the students. “You have a choice. You don’t feel that you have it right now, but you’re going to feel it eventually. You have a choice when things are difficult, and when things are great. You have a choice of what story you’re going to live out of, and all I want to do this MLK Day is to invite you to take that story seriously. Because there’s going to come a time when it gets challenged. What I want to urge you to do is to embrace a story that requires you and enables you to be a person that sees dignity, that takes action, that doesn’t passively surrender to the tedium of the crowd, that is willing to bear suffering … but that does so by nurturing hope. The thing that matters is what story are you going to live out of.”

Above (left to right): Guest speaker Gregory Thompson, Ph.D., a Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar, author, co-founder and creative director of Voices Underground, and Robert Edwards, a Scholar-in-Residence at Voices Underground, who was also scheduled to present at Gunn on January 20.

Below: Benjamin Kang, Dean of Belonging and Inclusion, with Dr. Thompson and Head of School Emily Raudenbush Gum

Additional Images

MLK Day 2025: Benjamin Kang, Dr. Robert Thompson, and Emily Gum