The students and faculty members of the Peddie community participated in numerous workshops in honor of Martin Luther King Day on January 16. The workshops, though varied in focus and activities, were intended to help students find the themes and meanings of the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s visit to the Peddie chapel.

The day’s activities began with a chapel speech where the key note speaker was Dr. Ruha Benjamin, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and biotechnology, race-ethnicity and gender, health and biopolitics. Her chapel talk focused on the role the new generation would play in the future of combatting racism, poverty and militarism.
​

“I thought it was really great. She was clearly very smart and handled student participation with grace. She connected it really well to students’ lives,” Beth Nicholson ’17 said of Benjamin’s chapel talk.

“I found Dr. Benjamin’s speech to be very interesting and enjoyable,” Oliver Crane ’17 said. “Though she shared some misleading statistics and stories, I agreed with her overall message that young people can and should be agents of change.”

After the chapel, hour and a half long workshops began. Peddie was honored to have 10 visitors to run workshops including those focused on art, social media, criminal justice, storytelling, racial bias. They provided students a safe place to examine these topics and discuss how they relate to social change in our generation.

Mariah Speller ’18 attended a workshop titled Being Heard: Storytelling and a Deeper Connection to Community run by writer Darrel Alejandro Holnes.

“Ethnography is a craft we were trying to learn in under two hours. I got to know a lot about my peers who come from different communities and have different traditions than me,” Speller said. “Mr. Holnes gave us all the tools we needed to conduct our own ethnographic interviews to generate our own stories. I thought it was very interesting.”

The Martin Luther King traditions at Peddie, with focuses on race, understanding and change, seem to be popular with the student body and faculty and will remain at the Peddie School community for years to come.