PORT ANGELES — It’s awful easy to walk around as though we’re asleep, asleep on our feet, Gloria Burgess told a theater full of students and other community members.
Fact is, Burgess said, every last one of us is laying down a legacy, as did the man we are remembering today.
“The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Burgess began, “taught us about words . . . he changed the course of history with his words.”
Burgess, a Seattle-based executive coach, author and poet, drew spirited applause for her talk, “A Salute to Martin Luther King Jr.,” on Thursday at Peninsula College’s Little Theater.
In her free public speech, though, she did not focus only on the civil rights leader born Jan. 15, 1929.
Instead, she spoke — in a voice like Tupelo, Miss., honey — straight to the people sitting before her.
Just like King, you have the power to change the world with your words, Burgess said.
Just like King, you can always, always speak to your neighbor, a friend, a stranger who needs lifting up.
Sixth-grade teacher
Burgess’ own sixth-grade teacher, Miss Gillespie, did that for her, with a ka-thunk on her desk one day.
Burgess had her head down, eyes closed, on that desk.
She was the only black girl in her class and didn’t feel comfortable going out on the playground at recess time.
So rather than making her go out there, Miss Gillespie brought her something.
It was a book by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes: The Dreamkeeper.
Inside lay words, a river of words with the music and cadence Burgess heard at home, from her family.
And this book was the first she had seen with words like those.
On that day, with those words, Miss Gillespie “gave me a long drink of water to save my shriveled-up little soul,” Burgess said.
The schoolteacher is one of many people in Burgess’ past.
She was like one of the ancestors who made her who she is.
Grateful
Miss Gillespie helped Burgess see how to be grateful for all of her experiences — early childhood in segregated Oxford, Miss., then moving north with her family but still facing vicious racism there — for shaping her into a woman of compassion.
Burgess is also a believer in serendipity: how a chance encounter, an off-the-cuff conversation can change the course of one’s life.
Her own father had two dreams: to live in a house with running water and to go to college.
His own folks responded with: “Nobody in our family has ever done that. Who do you think you are?”
Yet Burgess’ dad kept talking about his dreams.
He worked as a janitor at the University of Mississippi, aka Ole Miss.
Through a series of chance encounters, the dean there introduced him to William Faulkner, the Nobel laureate.
Faulkner took the young man under his wing and helped him go to college.
Burgess herself happened to meet a woman, at a conference in Geneva who invited her to another gathering in South Africa.
It was a celebration of the women who had marched 50 years before against apartheid.
Courage to stand up
At this assembly, Burgess turned to one of the women and asked: What gave you the courage to stand up?
“As black South African women, what gave you the courage to push back, against the white Dutch Boers” who ruled the land?
The woman to whom Burgess spoke stood up and loomed.
“She was 6 feet tall — without her hair,” Burgess recalled.
And she said: “We did it because we were mothers. And we did not want our children to go through the degradation, the humiliation, any more.”
‘We were mothers’
Hand clasped at her breastbone, Burgess repeated: “We did it because we were mothers.”
“We all have that mother place,” she added, “where we love someone, or some cause, or some thing so much that we are beside ourselves. We take a stand.”
Each of us has the ability to make a difference, she said: to work for a cause, to help a neighbor, to simply listen to a friend who is in pain.
And since Martin Luther King Jr. Day has become a day of service, Burgess encouraged her audience to seize the opportunity.
“We’re here today not only to honor Dr. King, but to honor ourselves,” she added.
King left us, at age 39, when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet April 4, 1968.
But his legacy — and ours — are current things, Burgess believes.
King “joined this invisible river,” a river of compassion “that was already flowing.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
