January 20, 2020

Welcome, everyone. It’s wonderful to be here with you today.

I grew up just outside of Washington, DC., a city known for its striking white marble monuments to three white men: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.

Those buildings were landmarks to us locals. To visitors who came to the city from all over the world, they served as photo opportunities, school field trip destinations, and tourist attractions.

When I was growing up, there was no white marble monument to Dr. Martin Luther King in the city of Washington, DC.  For the record, there is a monument to him there now, a rough-hewn statue in granite that was erected in 2011.

And yet Dr. King didn’t need a physical monument in the city.  As someone raised there, I can tell you that his spirit was and is powerfully present.

Dr. King does not loom over DC, the way that the oversized statues of Lincoln and Jefferson literally loom over ordinary-sized human visitors or the way the distinctive obelisk of the Washington Monument stands out from among the shorter buildings around it.

No, Dr. King doesn’t loom over the city because his legacy in DC is not one of stillness, of solid, unmoving presence.

His legacy is of movement, powerful, forward-focused, unified movement, literally embodied by the 1963 march he led in Washington DC, attended by a quarter of a million people.

Earlier today, we marched here in Fort Collins to honor Dr. King and his life’s work, his determination to make equity a reality and inclusion more than just a dream.

Now we are here together to hear from our keynote speaker, Dr. Ryan Ross, about how we move forward in classrooms and workplaces just as we moved forward along the streets.

I am so proud to be with you all today, and proud to be a part of a community that is not interested in static monuments to past achievements, our own or anyone else’s.

Here at CSU, we are interested in moving forward, together.

We are interested in marching, literally and figuratively, toward our goals and aspirations.

Think about who marches. Dr. King certainly did. Armies march into battle. Bands march as an integral part of their music-making. Parade members march to celebrate achievements. Protesters march to confront the injustices they oppose.

The act of marching is powerful. It speaks of determination to reach a destination, to achieve a goal. Dr. King knew this, and he knew what his goal was. Speaking to those who marched with him in Washington, DC in 1963, he invoked “the fierce urgency of now.”

“Now is the time,” he said, “to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”

More than 50 years have passed since that historic march and the speech that Dr. King delivered exhorting Americans to make dreams possible for the next generation.

We have come a long way since, but we have not come as far as he wanted us to come. We are not where we want to be in realizing the goals of equity, justice and inclusion for all members of our communities and our nation.

No one here today needs me to tell you this. We all know of incidents that speak to the persistence and painful power of racism and prejudice, on our campus, in our broader community, and sadly, across the country.

And yet we have not given up.

As I can also attest, here at CSU we are committed to coming together and to affirming our support for racial equality, for gender equity, for the defense and protection of our planet, for all of the essential core values that move us.

Note that phrasing: when we care deeply about something, we say that it moves us. What we really mean is that it makes us want to move:

Forward.

Faster.

And with our eyes fixed firmly ahead and our arms reaching out to encourage others to move with us.

All of us at CSU passionately want to make our world better. We want to realize Dr. King’s vision for our future. We refuse to say that it’s too late. And so we come together today to remember, to reaffirm, and to march.

This is powerful. And I believe that if we keep our feet moving forward together every day we will achieve our goals of equity, of unity, of justice for all.

That’s why I am excited to march with all of you: today, in 2020, and into our shared future.