Doing the Dream 2022

Ivy Tech celebrates the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By Maynard Eaton

It was the continuation of an 18-year-long Ivy Tech tradition, which produced a multi-racial cross-section of 300 or more education, political, religious, business, and Kokomo community influencers to examine the enduring issue of race.

“She will challenge each of us to consider our role in addressing this underlying and corrosive structure within our nation and our communities,” explained interim Ivy Tech Chancellor Ethan Heicher about event speaker and Brown University professor Dr. Tricia Rose’s message. “She spoke (Feb. 10) to a group of college and high school students about the ‘whitewashing’ of Dr. (Martin Luther) King, and how America’s perception of King in the ‘60s, and his growing radicalization, and the growth from civil rights to a broader political vision. It was not embraced at the time, and it has since been shuffled out of the way. Instead, we embrace this traditional, I Have a Dream Dr. King.” 

Brown University professor Dr. Tricia Rose speaks to attendees of Ivy Tech Community College’s annual ‘Doing the Dream’ event in Kokomo on Feb. 11.

King’s voice has been marginalized, argued Heicher.

Former Kokomo mayor and Ivy Tech Chancellor Steve Daily inaugurated this event in 2005 because he was “very conscious of the community college’s role in a relationship to the broad spectrum of communities that fill that larger community, including our strong African-American community within the Kokomo service area.”

A plethora of state and local elected officials, including Kokomo Mayor Tyler Moore and Kokomo City Councilman Ray Collins, were in attendance and ostensibly listening to Dr. Rose on Feb. 11. It remains a significant, “players-only invitation” event for Kokomo’s powerbrokers. Security Federal Bank President and CEO Annette Russell was also notable as a repeat prime sponsor seated at a front row table with key staff members like former Kokomo Common Council President Robert “Bob” Hayes.

Security Federal Bank President and CEO Annette Russell

“We have started diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives internally at Security Federal,” Russell said. “So, what we are doing is trying to educate our team members about what that means. It’s empowerment and having that sense of belonging; using it in our hiring practices. Then also taking our message outward in trying to identify individuals that are either not being served by the financial institutions industry or underserved. We are a boutique bank where we know our customers. We like to feel like we are an advisor to help people get on the right pathway, and that’s not the culture you see at every other financial institution.”

Then, showtime, or the compelling class as it turned out to be, earnestly ensued.

Dr. Rose is no joke! At Brown University, she serves as Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

“I’m from New York City. I was born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx,” Rose said. “It was quite an experience. Harlem was not a destination for restaurants in 1965, and the Bronx definitely was not. I’ve always been acutely aware of things that seemed unjust. It didn’t matter what it was about. It did not have to be about race. I was the neighborhood ‘it’s not fair’ queen.”

Rose is the author of three highly regarded books and is working on a multimedia research project designed to explain and make visible the influential but obscured power of systemic racial discrimination in present-day society. It was a sweeping, academic, hour-long discourse about how systematic racism works, and why.

“Wow, how can people not see this?” Dr Rose asked the audience during her lecture on systemic racism and how best to rectify it scientifically. “It’s so super visible. For me, it is the mechanism where we can come together as all different kinds of people to acknowledge and confront the reality of what we are dealing with and work together to figure out how to change it.”

That was a scholarly treatise on the troubling reality of racism in America and Kokomo, but the fiery political boxing battle over CRT – critical race theory teaching – stole the show in the controversial answers to it during Dr. Rose’s enthralling question-and-answer session.

“There has never been a moment in U.S. history where any effort to create racial justice has not been met with incredibly powerful resistance,” Rose said. “When you think about CRT, you have to put it in the context of that there has been a successful effort to transform people's understanding about racism in America today. This deep anxiety about not wanting to be blamed for racism makes people vulnerable to the narrative that is being presented around Critical Race Theory. That is to say, ‘Are you teaching my kids to hate white people?’ That is what the illusion is.

Dr. Rose continued, “Critical Race Theory is basically another way of trying to prevent the diversification of the curriculum, but it is also about saying you have to tell the truth about history. The Critical Race Theory is an orchestrated political agenda to undermine the ability to educate young people about race in America. Nobody I know wants to blame white people. The vast majority are interested in solving the doggone problem. Why are we only worried about harming white children about the reality that Black kids are already facing?”

Ivy Tech Chancellor Heicher echoed that sentiment.

“It’s a turning back and turning our back on our history,” he opined about CRT. “And without understanding where we have come from, and who we currently are, you cannot enact any change at all. The community college’s mission is to bring higher education in all of its perspectives to our students.”

Finally, Dr. Rose was asked by this reporter – who is also the SCLC National Communications Director – what she imagines SCLC co-founder Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would think about the issue of race in America today?

“On one hand, he would be unbelievably surprised by what my colleague, Dr. Cornell West, would call ‘Brown faces in high places.’ I think he would be amazed that we had Obama for eight years. Those positions were the fundamental symbols of a hierarchy. But King was very sophisticated; what he said and what he knew were two different things.”

She continued, “I think he would be thrilled by the expansion of the Black middle class, which was a result of the Civil Rights Movement, and he would be completely appalled by the economic inequality, which is extraordinary. He would be devastated that with so much wealth we have not only allowed it to be consolidated upward at a level unknown in human history, and that we have allowed people to live in horrid conditions under horrible circumstances, in the wealthiest, most resource rich country in human history. That would be a moral crisis for him of extraordinary proportion.”

--The Maynard Report is written by Maynard Eaton. He is an eight-time Emmy Award Winning journalist now based in Kokomo, and national communications director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He can be reached at eaton.maynard@gmail.com.