SECS at MLK Community Celebration

To wrap up the week-long commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the University hosted a Community Celebration event on Saturday, January 25 at the Krannert Center for Performing Arts. Alpha Phi Alpha, one of the oldest African American fraternities opened with some amazing stepping routines symbolizing Dr. King's values of dedication, precision, and practice. Unfortunately for him, SECS' own co-president Tyler Rotche had to follow that act with a very different but very moving speech on environmental justice. Beginning with the Greensboro sit in during the civil rights movement and moving to industrial waste being dumped in the predominantly black Warren County (North Carolina), Tyler exemplified Dr. King's belief that "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly". Find excerpts from Tyler's speech below.

"This was the birth of the environmental justice movement. The merger of civil rights and environmentalism. The same structural forces were at play, but they were much more covert. The water fountains weren't labeled 'colored', but the natural water sources would be labeled 'toxic'.

There have been advances on the front of environmental justice and executive orders signed, but as it stands today, exploitation continues along lines of race and class.

Burning coal results in 13,200 premature deaths and 9700 hospitalizations each year. As it stands, access to a healthy safe, livable environment is not a human right, it is a class privilege. And while everyone in this room may not be forced to deal with that injustice, you will not have to travel far to see it.

Within Students for Environmental Concerns, our campaigns are working to utilize the privilege and access we have within this University institution to promote sustainable food and access to sustainable food. To make houses more energy efficient so families can save some money. To ensure that the next generation of students understands these struggles. Our Beyond Coal campaign is working for these goals most directly. Pressuring the University to end its financial support of the coal industry. To ensure that our university doesn't profit from the injustice I have described so far.

The legacy of Dr. King like that of the civil rights leaders from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela is simple. That remaining silent in the face of injustice is not neutrality, because the status quo is anything but neutral."