MLK Jr. Week keynote speaker Jelani Cobb discusses race issues in America
Jelani Cobb, a staff reporter at The New York Times who focuses on race issues in America,
was the Keynote Speaker for the Martin Luther King Jr. Week last night.
In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns.
Held in the Bovee University Rotunda, the speech was one of seven MLK events held this week.
“We have an approach to the topic (of racism), where we feel the less we say about it, the closer we are to resolving it,” Cobb said.
Cobb teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was formerly associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Africana Studies Institute. Cobb is also an author of several books about racism and race.
Throughout the evening, Cobb spoke about the history of America and how “race and racism are fundamental to the American story.”
“Who is included in the idea of ‘we the people’?” Cobb asked. “We have a foundational relationship with the subject of race.”
Cobb went on to discuss his involvement in the trial of Dylann Roof, a mass murderer and white supremacist who killed nine black members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He retold the story of how the church members had invited Roof into their Bible study, only to later bow their heads in prayer as he began to shoot.
Cobb said after the final verdict was announced, he flew to San Francisco. There he spoke to a bellman at his hotel who had known a victims of the shooting.
“I had gone as far as I could go and literally the first person I talked to was personally affected,” Cobb said. “The problems that we think we can walk away from are the problems we find in the places that are most unlikely.”
Cobb ended his speech with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize speech.
“He talked about what really happens, not *just) what’s shown on the news,” Canton sophomore Joelle Boudreau said. “Everyone likes to pretend racism isn’t real or that it isn’t happening, but it is.”
