Among the events marking Martin Luther King Junior Day was Westminster College’s annual march through Salt Lake’s Sugar House neighborhood with students, faculty, and neighbors Monday.
Luciano Marzulli is the Director for Diversity Student Affairs at the Westminster. He encourages people to do their own studies of the work of Dr. King.
“There tends to be kind of a sanitized version of people when we’re able to grant them holidays and name streets after them. But I think that he did a lot of work that, even in 2015, some would question as radical or revolutionary and I think that’s the work we need to focus on,” says Marzulli.
Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson is with Diversity and Global Learning at Westminster. She says recognizing King’s legacy is still very relevant today because even though there has been a lot of progress for civil rights, the movement has a much larger meaning now.
“It’s also around issues of sexuality, ethnicity, national origin. Me, as the child of immigrants, get a lot from the legacy of Dr. King because I think that his work and the guarantees that the U.S. now has, benefit people like myself,” says Solorzano-Thompson.
She says the battle for social justice is not over but it’s getting better. She says there’s more media attention to injustices and people are standing up for human rights.