LYNN — Dr. Kiame Mahaniah says that while the events of last year present a “precious” moment in time in the quest to reconcile the nation with systemic racism, it is not necessarily a smooth moment.
Dr. Mahaniah, CEO of the Lynn Community Health Center, was the keynote speaker Monday during a virtual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day. The event, sponsored by the Lynn Community Minority Cultural Council, celebrated the 92nd anniversary of Dr. King’s birth, on Jan. 15, 1929. He was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
The ceremony, emceed by Darrell Murkison of the CMCC and lasting almost exactly an hour, featured a series of pre-recorded speeches, poems and musical selections focusing on racial justice. Among those speaking, aside from Dr. Mahaniah, was Lynn Mayor Thomas M. McGee. A film of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963, was also shown.
“Dreamers have a lot of work to do,” Dr. Mahaniah said. “There’s a lot of internal work that has to be done. How to work among themselves. How will we know the work has been done? How do we know it’s time to engage?
“This is a precious moment, but it’s going to be a very messy moment,” he said. “There is going to be a series of difficult conversations … a series of disappointing conversations.
“But people are messy,” he said. “Institutions are messy. And the issue of racism — and racism is one of the most difficult ones to confront the United States.”
Dr. Mahaniah said the coming years will be full of “amazing progress,” but that it will be difficult and “will exact a high emotional and physical price for us.
“But I feel as if we don’t have a choice, given what our ancestors lived through during slavery and Jim Crow,” he said. “I don’t think we can escape the pain of those times.”
Dr. Mahaniah first came to the LCHC five years ago, and for the last 2 ½ years has been its CEO. He was The Item’s Person of the Year for Lynn in 2019, and one of the reasons was his willingness to address the problem of teen pregnancy in the Lynn Public Schools.
He said that he feels that Dr. King has become sort of a “Rorschach test” in that “We all see what we want to see.
“People forget that he was an anti-war activist, too,” Dr. Mahaniah said. “They forget that at the time of his death, he was one of the more unpopular people in America.”
Dr. Mahaniah said that much progress has been made in the area of fighting racism since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
“But how do we leverage this moment?” he asked. “How do we make sure this is not a transitory moment?”
McGee said honoring Dr. King’s legacy and his fight for justice is important today “due to the racial injustices that took place last year, such as the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others.
“These events caused thousands of Americans to participate in Black Lives Matter marches all across America,” he said. “Dr. King once said that out of a mountain of despair comes a stone of hope. That is etched on the MLK memorial. We had our mountain of despair on Jan. 6 (the storming of the U.S. Capitol).”
McGee said, however, that the “stone of hope” occurred earlier in the day, when both Raphael Wornock, a Black minister, and Jon Ossoff, a Jew who had been an intern to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, won U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.
“The efforts of Dr. King and John Lewis, as well as Stacey Abrams, paved the way for the unprecedented Black turnout in Georgia,” he said.
Also featured in the program were a poem by Vick Breedy and two musical selections by Purpose. Rev. Adrienne Berry of the Zion Baptist Church in Lynn delivered the invocation, and Rev. Bernadette Hickman-Maynard of Lynn, the benediction.
Tunisha Guy-Figueroa sang the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
