People came to the City of Cambridge’s 16th annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday to hear great gospel music, to find inspiration, and to look forward.
Jennifer Landgren came with her husband and their two-year old, looking to start a family tradition. She said recognizing the sacrifices made by members of the civil rights movement is important in the current national political environment.
“I think there’s a bit of, like, a xenophobic energy happening around the country. It’s important for us to keep ourselves educated . . . on the past so that, as we move forward, we’re making good decisions as citizens, and as people,” she said.
Before the roughly 200 people in attendance at the St. Paul AME Church, Councillor E. Denise Simmons drew parallels between King’s era and today. “The forces of division want us to believe that freedom is something elusive, that fear is wisdom, that suspicion is safe and that we are too far gone, too different, too broken to find one another in our way back to community,” she said. “Dr. King faced these same dark, divisive forces in his lifetime… he saw the darkness more clearly than most of us ever will, and he refused to let it have the last word.”
The program alternated songs by The Millennium Gospel Choir and brief readings from King’s speeches and writings by community members. His words warned against what he referred to as the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism. The section of the event on militarism received a large audience reaction, its message starkly contrasting with recent U.S. incursions in Venezuela and threats by President Trump to invade Greenland.
Reading from King’s 1967 speech opposing the war in Vietnam, Bonnie Talbert, a Harvard professor and Cambridge resident, began “We often arrogantly feel that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world…” only to interrupted by chuckles and claps of recognition.
“We are arrogant in professing to be concerned about the freedom of foreign nations while not setting our own house in order,” Talbert continued. “Enlarged power means enlarged peril if there is not concomitant growth of the soul.”
State representative Mike Connolly said he left the service feeling emboldened to act on Dr. King’s teachings, “which unfortunately are still relevant today.” Connolly said people have to continue to speak against war with Venezuela, eliminating health care subsidies in favor of tax cuts for the rich, and what he called the racism evident in “these fascist ICE agents who are carrying out a mass deportation regime.”
Inspired by the choir
The choir’s songs often had people standing and singing along. At one point, state Rep. Marjorie Decker was dancing in her pew. “The power of love and the call to justice and to stand together, it was overwhelming and inspiring,” she said afterward. “My soul is so fueled right now, and it gives me this energy that’s like, ‘let’s do this, let’s keep doing this.’”
Along with the joy came a solemn reckoning, though. Keynote speaker Roeshana Moore-Evans, who served as the executive director of Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative and is the founder of Equity Empowerment Consulting, spoke poetically on institutional barriers people of color face. “When systems fail to care for people, people must become the system,” she said. “Courage is not always loud but is always necessary.”
Her remarks reflected a speech King gave in Cambridge in 1960 at the First Baptist Church (now the Central Square Church). King’s speech envisioned a letter written to America by St. Paul, a sermon, she said “that confronted this nation with a hard truth and a truth that still exists: America’s moral development has lagged dangerously behind its scientific progress. That indictment feels especially pointed here in Cambridge, right and at the center of scientific innovation, discovery and intellectual power,” she said.
Moore-Evans served in her role at Harvard until she abruptly resigned in September of 2024. She did not share her reasons for leaving at the time, but other initiative members who left at the same time alleged Harvard was rushing their work.
“My time here in Cambridge was providential. It taught me something important: that reckoning and justice are not academic exercises,” Moore-Evans said. She closed her remarks with a call to correct systemic injustice both nationally and in Cambridge, citing disparities in incarceration rates and gaps in local standardized test scores between Black students and their peers.
Councillor Cathie Zusy said she plans to take this discrepancy seriously. “I think we really need to focus on the schools,” she said, while acknowledging the city council’s main authority is over the budget. After the commemoration, she said she planned to attend a talk later on Monday in Brookline about how schools have failed black Americans. “I hope to come up with a list of things that we can implement here in Cambridge.”
For Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, whose previous terms were during the pandemic when this event was not held, the event was “beautiful.” “I loved being here. There was a lot of energy to the new year amidst confusion and chaos.”
New councillor Tim Flaherty said he found the event created “a sense of community, a sense of belonging in Cambridge, and a sense of ownership in our community and responsibility to one another as neighbors.”
That was echoed by Cambridge’s oldest resident, Marvin Gilmore, who turned 101 last September. “It’s a day of great connection,” he said. Gilmore fought in World War II, storming the beaches of Normandy alongside his all-Black unit in 1944. “To have lived 100 years in this city, to have seen change in Cambridge, is most rewarding and most enlightening.”
A stronger
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