History is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. History teacher Mr. Kevin Tryon spoke a version of these words to his European Dictators class this year. Those words could not ring more true when it comes to the discussion of the historical figure and civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On Thursday, February 5th, the history department’s Parker Lecture featured a visit from New York University’s Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History Dr. Thomas J. Sugrue.
Educated at Columbia, Cambridge, and Harvard, Dr. Sugrue is a twentieth-century U.S. historian of American cities and suburbs, race, civil rights, politics, and public policy. Dr. Sugrue is past president of the Urban History Association and the Social Science History Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Royal Historical Society, the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the Society of American Historians.
In his Parker Lecture speech, Dr. Sugrue addressed the misconceptions surrounding Dr. King. Dr. Sugrue honed in on various aspects of Dr. King’s character and how they are often singled out in his public perceptions.
For example, MLK Day, a holiday celebrated nationwide, emphasizes the need for service. However, Dr. King cannot be simply summed up as an advocate for service and civil rights. His philosophy and background were much deeper and more varied than these surface-level perceptions.
According to a Stanford study cited by Dr. Sugrue, Dr. King is the most well-known American historical figure to youth in America. This popular knowledge of Dr. King shaped Dr. Sugrue’s speech by giving every student in the Haverford audience a foundation to build on when it comes to learning about Dr. King and the civil rights movement.
“I thought he gave insight into a topic that I obviously knew about, but as he said in his speech, not to the depth at which he covered it—very surface level,” Fifth Former Jack Ford said. “I was able to learn a lot more about Martin Luther King and who he was as a person.”
The topic and method of delivery vary in how they were received by the student body. With attention spans lower than ever, according to a recent Google report, some may find lecturing as a way of learning outdated.
“I think with the community, it goes over two ways. I think the kids who are motivated and interested in history find it to be engaging and informative. I think other kids find it to be a very nice nap time, and I think it’s hard to bridge that gap. I think Dr. Sugrue did a great job trying to engage everybody.”
Jack Ford ’26
“I think it’s nice to have prominent historians come and talk to us. I know Eric Foner spoke here a few years ago, and he wrote our American history textbook,” Ford says. “I think with the community, it goes over two ways. I think the kids who are motivated and interested in history find it to be engaging and informative. I think other kids find it to be a very nice nap time, and I think it’s hard to bridge that gap. I think Dr. Sugrue did a great job trying to engage everybody.”
Sixth Former Matthew Yerger attended lunch with Dr. Sugrue following his lecture.
“I think it’s very appropriate given it’s Black History Month to highlight MLK. I appreciated the light he shed on Dr. King’s economic policies and other overlooked qualities that he had,” Yerger said.
Expanding on his experience with the post-lecture lunch, Yerger said, “The connection to the DEI movement was probably the most interesting thing to me, so I appreciated all the questions about that. For example, comparing the movement to the recent George Floyd protests.”
This topic can not be more timely as a recent executive order by President Donald J. Trump focused on this exact idea of DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion. The order “terminates ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) discrimination in the federal workforce, and in federal contracting and spending.”
Dr. Sugrue expanded on the convergence between modern DEI, the civil rights movement, and our current positioning with racial equality.
“The idea of a perfect union means imagining something that we don’t have or we’re pretty far away from, but really ideally, if we truly lived in a society where racial distinctions didn’t matter, then we would see pretty common influence across people racial and ethnic backgrounds,” Dr. Sugrue said.
“So we would see people living and they create different housing and markets where they’re wanted to live in society where it was more or less equality, there are differences between the individuals, yes, but the difference between the individuals don’t sum up the differences between groups of individuals based on their inherent personal or physical or behavioral characteristics. I mean there’s a lot of research going back decades. It depends on where you’re situated in the larger social order, and that’s why we’ve come a long way. They were hard-fought, but we still have a long way to go to get to what I would see as following that [MLK’s] dream.”
Dr. Sugrue closed his time at Haverford with some words about Dr. King’s beliefs and how they would apply to today’s world.
“Central to King’s vision from his Social Gospel training as a theology student up to the people’s movement in 1968 was the idea that ‘we should build a broad coalition of people who are having insecure lives, don’t have access to good housing with schools, who are discriminated against in employment, don’t have access to good jobs, and we should bring them all together,’” Dr. Sugrue said. “What would happen if he’d been alive? He would be working really hard to try to break down the distrust between different groups. In other words, to use the language of today, to be an economic populist but bring everyone together over some common goals.”
