The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Media Credit: Submitted Photo Martin Luther King, Jr. impacted public policy, eliminating segregation, and inspired various black communities in the United States to resist discrimination and persist in the struggle for equal rights. [Click to enlarge]

The Office of Student Life, The Cross-Cultural Center and the Black Student Alliance will host a breakfast celebration Monday commemorating the triumphs and influence of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The breakfast, to be served at 10 a.m. in the Multipurpose Room of the Busch Student Center, will include musical selections-performed by The Barenaked Statues, Melodies of Praise and Beyond All Reason-and a speech given by Norman R. Seay, a former civil-rights activist who marched with King and is the founder of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Committee.

BSA Senator Charles Flint, a coordinator of the event, said that the three groups had decided on a breakfast celebration because, "Dr. Martin Luther King day is not a day to sleep in-it's a day on, not a day off."

Last year, Flint attended a memorial breakfast at Southeast Missouri State. The breakfast, which Flint has attended for almost a decade, drove him to propose that Saint Louis University adopt a celebration of its own.

"We hope it will be a great success, and, eventually, we hope it will become tradition here at SLU," Flint said.

Tickets, which can be purchased in the Office of Student Life, located on the third floor of the BSC, are $7 for faculty and staff, $5 for students and $10 for visitors and will be available through Friday, Jan. 14.

King's policy of nonviolent protest, and the movement he spurred, eroded longstanding, systematic discrimination of African-Americans. As a pastor for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, Ala., where he staged a 382-day boycott of the city's then-segregated bus lines, King established himself as the vanguard of the civil-rights movement. Imperturbable, King sustained his protest amid imprisonment and the bombings of his home. Ultimately, the Supreme Court deigned bus segregation unconstitutional.

In 1957, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which bound together a number of black leaders, who, under King's tutelage, spread his peaceful designs for ending discrimination to black communities throughout the United States.

In Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, King's nonviolent campaign was tested, but remained steadfast. Protesting for fair-hiring practices and the desegregation of department stores, hundreds of African-Americans, King among them, were beaten and imprisoned by local police.

In confinement, King composed "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," which rebuked his critics and articulated the plight of not only those who were battered in Birmingham, but of those in far-flung communities throughout the United States struggling against discrimination and brutality.

King's impact, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, still resonates today. He continued his work, shoring up voter-registration campaigns, launching programs for the scholastic advancement of African-Americans and reinvigorating slums throughout the country with opportunity and purpose, until his assassination in April of 1968.

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