The 38th annual MLK Day event featured student voices, live music and reflections on past and present struggles for civil rights
By Steve Mitchell, Ashland.news
Ashlanders came out in the hundreds to celebrate the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, Jan. 19, filling the Historic Ashland Armory.
This year’s theme, a Dr. King quote, “The time is always right to do right,” called on people in the community to speak out and strive for justice, equity, and peace.
The event, in its 38th year, featured live music, spoken-word performances and a keynote address from Southern Oregon University President Rick Bailey.
The packed program also included choral and spoken-word performances by the Rogue Valley Peace Choir and students from Southern Oregon University (SOU), Ashland High School, Ashland Middle School, and Helman and Walker elementary schools.
Performers and speakers highlighted what King spoke out against during his lifetime, including racial injustice, economic inequality and violence.
Throughout the program, speakers pointed out current issues and events that resonate today.
During her speech, SOU professor Alma Rosa Alvarez said that, as a person of faith, she is struggling with the “here and now.”
Alvarez talked about recent news headlines that touched on government overreach, racial injustice, and violence, including the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.
She added that the Trump administration expanded its travel ban and that 70% of the African continent is under it.
“If that is not an anti-blackness campaign, I don’t know what is,” Alvarez said.
She said that in all the examples she cited, the administration has constructed a boogeyman to fight.
She quoted lyrics from the Childish Gambino song “Boogieman,” that the ways Black men have been imagined as threats to whiteness in the U.S. have led to violence.
Alvarez said recently she had a racist encounter with a white woman in Ashland who suspected her of being a member of Antifa, an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups that resist fascists and neo-Nazis.
“She told me with gusto that the military was going to come and take all Antifa trash out of Southern Oregon,” Alvarez said. “As she passed me, she said, ominously, ‘Watch out, Antifa is all over this town.’”
The implications of the encounter were chilling, Alvarez said, in that someone would hold such fear and hatred of a supposed enemy and that she would welcome the militarization of a civilian space. Not only that, but she would be among those enemies whisked away by the military.
“We have clearly lost our way,” Alvarez said.
Indeed, Ashland has not been immune to racism in recent years. In 2020, Aidan Ellison, a Black teenager, was shot dead in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn by 47-year-old Robert Paul Keegan, who was upset by loud music.
Keegan was sentenced to 12 years on multiple charges, including first-degree manslaughter. His acquittal on a first-degree murder charge led some in Ashland to protest after his sentencing.
In 2021, it was reported that then-Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Nataki Garrett, a Black woman, along with another Black female senior management official, required security whenever they were in public due to documented death threats.
For his part, Richardson reinforced the message of King’s 1967 “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” which called for a “worldwide fellowship” that lives with a “neighborly concern” beyond one’s “tribe, race, class and nation.”
In his keynote speech, Bailey touched on the theme “The time is always right to do what’s right” and on how to do what’s right during challenging times, especially when there are so many examples to the contrary.
These are really challenging times, when times are tough. How do you know how to do what’s right when there are so many examples otherwise?
To answer that question, Bailey illustrated his points with two personal stories from his time in the U.S. Air Force in Montgomery, Alabama.
In the first story, Bailey talked about his visit to the Tuskegee Airmen Museum. The Tuskegee Airmen were the country’s first Black military pilots. For Bailey, himself an Air Force pilot, the airmen were personal heroes. The group flew numerous combat missions during World War II to fight fascism abroad. Their service is credited with helping end racist stereotypes and hastening the integration of the military not long after World War II.
Bailey said that, on entering the museum, his nephew commented that all of the pilots were Black. He said he fumbled through explaining the racism from the time and that military leaders didn’t — at the time — believe that Black pilots were as skilled as their white counterparts.
According to Bailey, his nephew pointed out the absurdity of such racism.
While that story gives hope that future generations might see the absurdity of such prejudice, it’s important not to be so naive as to forget the country’s racist past.
His second story underscored that point. Also during his time in Alabama, he attended the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when hundreds of people walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way from Selma to Montgomery, marching for the right to vote.
Watch the event
To view a video of the Ashland MLK Day event, click here
The civil rights marchers faced “unspeakable” violence from local law enforcement armed with billy clubs and teargas.
That brutality was televised, and in many places across the country, nationally. It showed “the first pictures in real time of the brutality of racism,” Bailey said. Many historians agree that it was one of the catalysts for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, according to Bailey.
Bailey said he attended the 50th anniversary with a friend from Alabama who was a young girl in 1965 and was at the march, and remembered seeing the bridge. Bailey said that upon learning that Edmund Pettus was a high-ranking officer in the Confederate Army and later a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, the bridge should be renamed.
His friend Shiela, who witnessed the brutal violence that day, told him that as Americans, we can’t paint over history and that name.
“We have to remember what we are capable of doing to each other as human beings,” he said. “And it was a really powerful moment. It was her way of saying, we can’t just paint over the past, because then we’re doomed to repeat it.”
Bailey said that his favorite King quote is: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
It doesn’t bend organically, or on its own, Bailey said. He said it bends when people come together, put their shoulders into it, and push on, especially when times are hard.
The engine that helps to push that arc is fueled by love, he said.
“What does that mean for us? We can learn the lessons from the past and build a future, and not just a future, but build a map today where everyone is worthy and deserving of love and respect, no matter the color of their skin,” he said.
Email Ashland.news associate editor Steve Mitchell at stevem@ashland.news.
Related stories:
‘The time is always right to do right’: Ashland celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day Monday (Jan. 16, 2026)
Building a bigger ‘we’: Renowned civil rights expert john a. powell addresses packed Ashland audience at launch of ‘All.Together.Now’ (Oct. 9, 2025)
Ashland’s 37th annual MLK Celebration: ‘The battle is in our hands’ (Jan. 20, 2025)
Building a BASE: Black Alliance & Social Empowerment works on community building (Feb. 9, 2024)
Ashland marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 17, 2022)
