For 28 years, Oswego State has been home to the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. On Jan. 26, T.J. Holmes was the keynote speaker for this year’s celebration.
Holmes took to the stage in the newly renovated Waterman Theatre in Tyler Hall to speak on behalf of the theme: “Keepers of the Dream,” pursuing unity through our shared humanity.
Holmes is a news anchor and correspondent for ABC, with previous experience anchoring for CNN, as well as working for NBC and BET.
Even with traveling to multiple countries, covering the Olympics and attending sporting events like the Cubs’ 2016 World Series Championship, Holmes was ecstatic in taking to the stage in front of an audience, an undertaking not often part of his daily tasks.
“I always crave to be in the room with a live audience and actually see the reaction and get some feedback so I just love this type of thing,” Holmes said.
Getting to interact with his audience was on the forefront of Holmes’ agenda as he spent the latter half of his time on stage offering a question and answer style chat with the audience.
“Talking to college students, it’s my thing,” Holmes said. “It’s hard to say no to colleges when they come calling.”
Many of the questions Holmes was presented with led him back to anecdotes from early on in his career. He also spoke of the difficulty of the millennial generation and how the generation is often expected to have a finished product with no help along the way.
“I stand here and we too often give you all the finished product, and this is often the problem,” Holmes said. “We talk about these kids, the finished product is a successful record. They don’t see the steps it took necessarily.”
When prompted about race, a central topic to the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, Holmes spoke on the issue of exposure and open-mindedness. He said that to be open-minded, one has to be exposed to different aspects of race and culture that create diversity in society.
This diversity was a central theme during the entire Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration.
Several choir groups, the State Singers, Gospel Choir and Vocal Effect, performed songs encompassing Gospel and African roots as a tribute to Dr. King.
Prior to the keynote speaker, junior Lamont Sadler powerfully recited Dr. King’s famed “I have a dream” speech from his march on Washington.
The event concluded with the entire audience singing “We Shall Overcome” in unison accompanied by the director of Choral Activities, Mihoko Tsutsumi.
For many attendees, including sophomore Alikeju Adejo, the celebration was an event honoring one of the nation’s greatest change makers. Adejo felt that the celebration brought a feeling of unity with her black peers and yet a longing need of change to reach equality.
One of the central ideas Holmes spoke to was the idea of “blackness.” He explained that on network television, talent may look diverse, but in there is an extreme lack of diversity behind the scenes. He also shared an anecdote from when he was on-air reporting and was criticized for being “too black.”
Adejo felt inspired by some of Holmes’ remarks during the event.
“[Holmes’] remark on how being the only black person in a place can make you sort of like an ambassador for all black people was very interesting to me because although I realized that some people only know of black people through the media it never really put things into perspective for me,” Adejo said.
