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MLK Westminster College March Through Sugar House Focuses on Civil Right Progress

Bob Nelson
Signs collected following the Sugar House march for Martin Luther King Junior Day by Westminster College.

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.

Bob Nelson is a graduate of the University of Utah with a BA in mass communications. He began his radio career at KUER in 1978 when it was still in Kingsbury Hall. That’s also where he met his wife, Maria Shilaos, in 1981. Bob left KUER for commercial radio where he worked for 25 years, and he is thrilled to be back at KUER. Bob and his family are part of an explorer group, fondly known as The Hordes and Masses, which has been seeking out ghost towns and little-known places in Utah for more than twenty years.
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