By members of 2B1
In 2B1, we aim to honor and connect to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy through Morgan Stone Week. Morgan Stone was a long-time Lincoln School student and founding member of 2B1, graduating in the class of ‘00. A few months into her freshman year of college, Morgan passed away. We hold Morgan Stone Week each year in commemoration of Morgan’s spirit and dedication to issues of racial equity. With support from our Center for Justice, Peace, and Global Citizenship, we take this opportunity to renew our commitment to creating a community of learners that celebrate diversity, inspire service, and foster a culture of peace. This year, Morgan Stone Week will be happening the week of January 24th, and will center around the theme of Justice in Healthcare. “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Systemic racism as it manifests within healthcare has uniquely disastrous consequences, and is deeply harmful to patients, doctors, and communities. Over the past two years, deep-rooted historic racial disparities in health have been exacerbated by the onset of COVID-19. With this in mind, 2B1 aims to create a week of education, discussion, reflection, and activism focusing on injustice in all forms of health (physical, mental, social, etc.) through listening to speakers, attending workshops, and talking with one another. At the end of the week, 2B1 will be sending out a list of resources/information/ways to get involved, but if you’d like to learn more about the theme, these are some introductory videos. (We watched one together last Wednesday). How structural racism is magnifying the public health crisis If You're Not White It's Harder To Get Mental Health Care Also, as part of this year’s Morgan Stone Week, we’ll be watching the documentary Power to Heal - you can find the trailer here. Lastly, we’re so grateful to have Dr. Dionne Wright Poulton, the Chief Diversity Officer at Care New England Health Systems in RI, as our keynote speaker for this week. She will talk to us about her perspective on Justice in Healthcare from her work overseeing all diversity, equity and inclusion endeavors, involving over 7,000 employees and many thousands of patients, at three hospitals and in several healthcare facilities across the system. Dr. Poulton is a leading expert on diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias, and transformational adult learning and behavior with special emphasis in addressing, mitigating and solving intercultural conflicts and incidents of unconscious bias in the workplace, and is also a formally trained K-12 teacher with a Ph.D. in Adult Education.
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By members of 2B1
In the days/weeks following MLK day, 2B1 has been reflecting on his message of peace, racial and social justice, and nonviolent direct action as a means to change. We’d like to share some of what we’ve been thinking about with the greater Lincoln community! We frequently remember Dr. Martin Luther King for part of his I Have a Dream speech, but don’t as often think of the many other speeches he gave and ideas that he stood for. During one protest, Dr. King (along with many other protesters) was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. Here, he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail in response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. We watched part of this together last Wednesday, but this is the whole reading, and you can find the full transcript here. As we look at the present moment, Bernice King - the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, continues to keep her father's memory alive. She fights for equity and justice as a global thought leader, orator, peace advocate, and the CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. As she says, we should aim to remember the life and legacy of MLK by both continuing to invoke his words, and furthering his strive for justice and change today. Last Wednesday, we watched part of the video interview at the end of this article. In accordance with MLK Day this year, Dr. Bernice King has spoken about the importance of using her father’s words in the ways he intended them, and honoring his message of nonviolent direct action to achieve social change by fighting to pass voting rights bills today (Dr. Bernice A. King - Continuing the King Family Legacy | The Daily Show). Lastly, many of the photos of Dr. King we see today are in black and white, which, though they convey important stories, can tend to create distance between the world of his life and that of our own. This year, 2B1 has found some full-color photos of Dr. King that we’d like to share, click here to view them. |
About the Page:
Hey, Lincoln School! Here 2B1 will post about what they're doing, what Rhode Island is doing, and what the world is doing regarding race relations and social justice. Everything below has been discussed or will be discussed by 2B1 in the upcoming weeks. |