For the last time this century, the Wittenberg community honored Martin Luther King Jr. during the Wittenberg Series’ Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Convocation, Jan. 18.

Weaver Chapel filled with faces of diversity to remember King’s life, work and humanitarianism. Throughout the event, representatives from Wittenberg’s faculty, staff, students and alumni welcomed the dawn of a new millennium and the birth of new hope for Wittenberg, the nation and the world.

During the convocation, Ronald Woods, ’69, gave the keynote address titled “From the Mountain Tops of History: Engaging Our Past, Envisioning Our Future,” which appears in its entirety beginning on page—.

As Concerned Black Students’ first president and one of its founders, Woods laid the groundwork for a clearer definition of the role and importance of minority students at Wittenberg.

In leading the first Black student protest in 1969, he helped bring the Wittenberg community face-to-face with the pervasiveness of racism in American society and forced the University to work toward eradication of any expression of racism, individual or group, conscious or unconscious.

“The task before us today, as members of a greater Wittenberg and Springfield community, is to bring into being a future predicated on our sense of the past and worthy of the unparalleled promise of the present,” Woods said.

“As a greater Springfield community, diverse in class, culture, race, ethnicity and religion, we can exit this century on a far higher plane than was the racial status quo with which it began.”

Woods earned his J.D. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and went on to a distinguished career as an attorney and as an educator.

He has developed a highly respected, nationally recognized program in African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and currently serves as the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee on Curriculum Diversity at Eastern Michigan.

The Wittenberg community also commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. through a weeklong series of events, including panel discussions and presentations on campus activitism, racial healing, Malcolm X, empowerment and the African-American community, and Islam