Loud drums and African dances welcomed civil rights icon the Rev. Joseph Lowery to the Duke Chapel Sunday as the keynote speaker for Duke's 2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration.
Lowery, who will deliver the benediction at the Inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama Tuesday, urged the Duke community to bring social change.
"I've come to ordain you. I came to call you to be chaplains on the common good," Lowery said. "Nudge your group, nudge your community, nudge your family and nudge your friends towards the causes of justice, fairness and equality."
Throughout his speech, Lowery expressed worry that people knew about King but were not striving to live to his teachings, noting that people should reconnect with King's message of working for change.
"We have exalted the messenger but ignored the message," said Lowery, a survivor of the civil rights movement who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside King. "It's good to honor the preacher, but we have to listen to the sermon."
Organizers chose "What Becomes of the Dream? Faith and Politics, Vision and Leadership" as the theme for the celebration because they wanted to reinvigorate students to make King's dream relevant to their personal lives, said the Rev. Patrick Thompson, director of Black Campus Ministries and a member of the coordinating committee.
"A lot of students here at Duke enjoy a level of freedom and opportunity that our ancestors did not. And as a result, Dr. King's message may seem distant to them," Thompson said. "Our goal was that students would engage with the question 'What becomes of the dream?' in their own lives."
Students in the audience, in turn, expressed a desire to take on the legacy of King and continue his work.
"For me, you have to realize that the dream is not just one thing or one goal," said freshman Daren Miller. "Just because Obama will be president doesn't mean that the dream has been realized. [Lowery] encouraged us to strive for our dreams and always reach for something better."
Front and center throughout the celebration was the correlation between the King holiday Monday and Obama's inauguration Tuesday.
"Let none of us think that Inauguration day this year could have even happened without the work Dr. King and other civil rights leaders did all those years ago," President Richard Brodhead said.
Lowery said he always believed that one day there would be a black president.
"We just didn't know the date," Lowery said, adding that he thought the day would come after his death.
There was a tangible sense of pride in the audience over Obama's election, as any mention of his victory was met by the crowd with a collective 'Amen.'
This was especially true because North Carolina supported Obama, the first time the state had voted for a democratic candidate for president since 1976.
"'President Barack Obama'-music to my ears and food for my soul," Durham Mayor Pro-Tem Cora Cole-McFadden said. "Now we must never doubt that we as individuals and as a community do have the power to make a difference."
Lowery called on those in attendance to be "crazy" in seeking social change, adding that at times he personally thought King himself was crazy to march with the Ku Klux Klan "hiding in the bushes."
"But crazy is just like my cholesterol," Lowery said. "There's good crazy and then there's bad crazy."
But he said he has nothing but admiration for his brother in the civil rights struggle.
"[King] was a man whose commitment to the common good led him into the fiery furnace of racial struggle," Lowery said. "But just like those Old Testament warriors Meshach, Shadrach and 'a bad Negro,' he refused to bow down."
Lowery said 'chaplains of the common good' would face many obstacles, but they should not be fearful because "God always protects good crazy."
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