"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Four Dartmouth graduates who exemplify that statement, originally spoken by Mahatma Gandhi and invoked by Student Assembly President Molly Stutzman '02, were honored at the College's first annual Social Justice Awards last night in Collis Commonground.
"We applaud our athletes, artists and scholars. It is time to applaud those who work for social justice as well," Stutzman said in opening remarks, noting the contributions of many unrecognized members of the Dartmouth community, including alumni who have gone on to work with such groups as Teach for America and the Peace Corps.
The four recipients took home awards in three categories: Emerging Leadership, Ongoing Commitment and Lifetime Achievement.
Dartmouth graduate Miranda Johnson '97 was awarded the Emerging Leadership prize. Johnson, who is currently working with Tanzanian women in Dar-es-Salaam, emphasized students' responsibility to use their expensive education for a greater good.
"All of us who have graduated from Dartmouth have had an enormous amount invested in us," she noted. "We leave this place in debt."
Beth Robinson '86, a Middlebury, Vt.-based lawyer instrumental in her state's legalization of civil unions, took the Ongoing Commitment award. Robinson, whose accomplishments include co-founding the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force in 1995, described receiving an award in King's name as "extremely humbling."
Two alumni took the Lifetime Achievement award: James Strickler '50, DMS '51 and John Topping, Jr. '64.
Strickler, a former Dartmouth Medical School Dean, was occupied with international rescue work in Thailand and thus unable to attend the ceremony. Joseph O'Donnell '71 noted Strickler's remarkable faith in the strength and resilience of the people he helped.
Elizabeth Topping '02 and Alexandra Topping '04 presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to their father, a leading environmentalist. The elder Topping sister recalled asking her father why he stayed in environmental aid work while so many college classmates had gone on to lucrative jobs in corporate law.
"He knew that every day he was working to make the world better ... It sounds really cheesy, but it's true, and it's meant so much to me," she said.
Prior to the presentation of the awards, in a lecture entitled "Paths to Social Justice: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s World and Ours," history professor Bruce Nelson spoke on several topics surrounding the slain civil rights leader, including the current tendency to present King as a "safe and sanitized icon."
Such portrayals, Nelson argued, neglect the complexities of King's role as a controversial and groundbreaking figure. The oft-quoted "I Have a Dream" speech does not present a whole picture of King's political attitudes, but rather shows the leader at his "most optimistic and conciliatory" stage.
Nelson recalled that until 1963's Children's Crusade, the Kennedy administration tended to regard King's civil rights demonstrations as a nuisance and a hindrance to the Cold War effort. Only by sending thousands of children "eager to march and willing to be arrested" out into the treacherous streets of Birmingham did King and the movement begin to achieve substantive political gains.
"It was brilliant strategy, and it was brilliant theatre," Nelson said, though the move cost King support among some blacks in Birmingham who felt he had gone to far.
Nelson also questioned the response King may have had to the surge of patriotism that has followed Sept. 11. While King was undeniably a patriot, he was also a pacifist unafraid to speak out against the masses, and thus might well have objected to "simplistic and nakedly ethnocentric" policy proposals and generalizations about President Bush's enemy "evil-doers."
Nelson concluded by thanking King for setting an example "that we too may be troublemakers, and agents of justice, and agents of reconciliation."
Organizers presented this year's winners with a clock bearing a message taken from King's letter from a Birmingham jail: "We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right."
A plaque bearing the names of all recipients will hang in the Collis Center.
Persons eligible for the College's Social Justice Awards include any present or former administrators, staff, students and faculty.
