King Institute Award winners honored at inaugural event
BY BARBARA PALMER
Clayborne Carson (center), a professor of history and founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, presented King Institute awards to recipients including former Secretary of State George Shultz (right), the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at a gathering at Tresidder Union on Friday afternoon. The event celebrated both the legacy of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and the inauguration of the King Institute, now part of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCRSE). Kiron K. Skinner (left) is a Hoover Institution research fellow.
For Harold Boyd, a former dean and former director of the Medical Fund for the Office of Development, growing up in North Carolina in the days before passage of civil rights legislation meant being "beaten, pushed back, told what I couldn't do and restricted in what I could do."
"Dr. [Martin Luther] King was like a bolt from heaven. He made me stand up and feel like a man for the first time," Boyd said Friday at a ceremony at Tresidder Memorial Union held to honor the legacy of the late civil rights leader. The event also celebrated the expansion of the King Institute, formerly the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project, which has joined with the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute has raised approximately $4 million in an ongoing campaign to create a $12 million endowment to be used to permanently support its work, which includes editing and publishing King's writings and speeches, and developing curricula and research activities.
On Friday, Boyd and five others, including former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, were presented with King Institute Awards, which recognize their contributions to the King Institute and its efforts to disseminate King's message of peace and social justice to diverse audiences, said Clayborne Carson, professor of history and the King Institute's director and founder.
Shultz, who served in President Richard Nixon's administration and as the U.S. secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, was a consistent voice for moderation and tolerance throughout his long career, Carson said. In accepting the award, Shultz spoke of the multitude of problems that currently face the United States. King's legacy was showing the world "how, when you see a major problem in society or between nations, how to get at that in a nonviolent way and produce major change," Shultz said. Other award recipients were Wayne Duckworth, a retired staff member of Information Technology Systems and Services; artist-musician Drue Kataoka; and folk singers Guy and Candie Carawan.
King's message is one that fits in well with CCSRE, said its director, Lawrence Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor. The 10-year-old center includes programs in African and African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Jewish Studies, Native American Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a research division that sponsors activities including a faculty research network, conferences and fellowships.
"King's message ultimately—and especially toward the end of his life—was about all people in the human condition, not just the circumstances of African Americans. If his vision started from the black struggle in the U.S., it surely did not end with the conditions of and aspirations of one group or the problems facing one nation," Bobo said.
The addition of the King Institute also can "serve as a spark to really taking on the challenges of our times as King might see them," Bobo said. "Too much remains in need of doing with regard to poverty and discrimination, with regard to the treatment of immigrants, legal and otherwise, with regard to understanding of religious differences at home and around the world, and with regard to the excesses of an unchecked marketplace for us to ever accept the counsel of ignoring difference or passive acceptance of gaping inequalities and material hardship for fear of somehow reinforcing difference or upsetting the appearance of social quiescence."
Friday's ceremony also marked the passage of the responsibility of carrying forward the King legacy at Stanford from Carson to the university as an institution, Carson said.
King's papers came here almost by accident, Carson noted. He happened to be teaching here in 1985 when Coretta Scott King called Carson to ask him to edit and publish her late husband's papers. During the intervening 21 years, that project has been a gift as well as a "heavy responsibility," Carson said.
"One of the things that comes through it is the understanding that being part of the great global ongoing struggle to expand the scope of human freedom and justice is a privilege. … It's a great message that needs to be combined with the research resources of Stanford University and with the communication resources of Silicon Valley."
