Teri-Denise pays tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a reflective segment, acknowledging his monumental role in the civil rights movement. The discussion touches on King's teachings of equality and compassion, as well as personal anecdotes from Teri-Denise's childhood that highlight the importance of kindness and understanding.

Hello there.

This is Teri-Denise, a Lansing Community College student and your host of Ripper in LCC Connect podcast, where I interview others and ask about their unique efforts and connections in around and beyond the community of Michigan's capital city. Hello, this is Teri-Denise from Ripper.

So we gave some kind of act of kindness or some representation in memoration for this activist, this American activist. And I just wanted to speak a little bit up on that. This is not going to be a full show.

I wanted to take a couple minutes, though, and hope you appreciate some of the words that I have.

So, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Activist in America, one of the heralding personnel in the civil rights movement here in America, and he was inspired and had been a proponent in forwarding a lot of civil rights actions that weren't only taking place in the United States of America, but worldwide.

He had learned and had read from many, many other humans, such as Gandhi, and even his name itself, Martin Luther, is from the inspiration for breaking apart, I guess you could say, from. And having some kind of freedom of sorts from the past in different factions of breaking apart from a state of things. He was named for Martin Luther.

But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here in America represents a lot of great things. So I'm just going to speak about his legacy and what it means to me personally.

I'll start off, actually, I've mentioned it before, but I, of course, grew up in Michigan and I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. Actually. I went to one of the elementary schools in East Lansing School District.

And I, I was very, very fortunate to have had a teacher, Yvonne Purnell, Mrs. Pernell, who was a great, great, inspiring individual who led many children onto focusing on positive actions and positive spirit, having an appreciation for learning and inviting and invoking the spirit of that being a great thing to have intelligence, to be kind towards one another even when you didn't realize that you weren't being that, you know, that you were growing up. So she was my second grade teacher, actually, and I'm a muskrat. I'm a marble muskrat. Proud. So, so second grade.

That would mean that I would have been around maybe about seven at the time. So she really, really helped me to understand a lot of different things that I didn't understand had already happened in the world.

So she introduced so many of us to understanding kindness towards each other. It's not so much as this heralding statement or protesting or any kind of action such as that.

It was liter literally just how to treat each other and providing a balance within yourself to help in moments where you may feel imbalanced or others around you may feel imbalanced and unjustifiably so.

So this spirit of, like, just being introduced to a civil rights movement and being inspired by so many other individuals helped me understand that going to school could be this great, great thing. It didn't have to be this terrible. I'm tired, and things are getting so, so difficult in a second grader's mind.

You know, you're growing up and you start to realize that the world is much bigger than what you think it is, because you got one straight shot. You're getting up and getting your book back together, eating your oatmeal and chewing on your Flintstones vitamins.

And then you're getting on a bus or getting dropped off at school, and, you know, it's time to start learning about things. And we had gone beyond only just going in and tracing our hands for the turkey for Thanksgiving.

We were in these moments of learning about our country and where we came from as individuals and what other people from other areas of the world who came to East Lansing, what they were learning about. We were all learning about these things at the same time. So this was all new to mostly everybody.

And it was terrifying in the best way to learn about experiences that Americans that came before us had gone through.

And the impact that this amount of education and knowledge had on me was so helpful in understanding what others have possibly gone through in their lives. It learned a lot about radical empathy without realizing it, because we weren't calling it that.

We were just learning how to support each other and how maybe to react a different way. There's a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds that I sat in class with.

And we all had to learn from our own mistakes that we may have made with each other or, you know, just to help teach ourselves how to be better guided and how to be a leader in our own rights. And I don't think that anybody who came out of Mrs. Purnell's class could ever say that they didn't learn how to be a better human.

And that was definitely helped along by the Recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. S birth, which I didn't realize, maybe we were told at the time, but it didn't really, in a young person's mind, it didn't really make sense because your distance from birth to where you were as a 7, 8 year old, it's just kind of like, oh, okay, this is a new thing. But I'm also new, so my frame of reference for things happening are a little bit more limited on the grand scope and scape of things.

So finding out that, oh, this is a person who helped people form an idea and this notion and this very feasible reason, the state of logic of being as a human, this act of knowing that equality, equity is a very attainable and a very, very good thing to have for one another. As a child, learning what equality meant meant that you had to learn that there was in fact an inequality going on. So it was an undertaking.

But I think so many of us evolved very quickly and grew to understand that this was very important thing that we all needed to know for social skills and for knowing that there was no way that you can't be a better person regardless of where you're coming from, when you're coming from in any regard. So there was the famous I have a Dream speech that was said on the Washington Mall in front of the monument there in DC.

And I'm not going to go into the speech or like play a feed, but I wanted to talk about the fact that the tone and intention behind that I have a Dream speech, all of the words there, the speech itself is beyond moving because those words are severely sincere and true.

King's voice and rhetoric, it put forth efforts to crack this illusionary veil forced upon humans for way too long, and then breaking apart the notion that words alone aren't the pathway to true freedom is kind of what that speech was saying. It is in fact the truth in act that humans present and represent themselves. This would be through their character.

This is what allows one to see through this thick veil of unjustified restrictions, foundations built upon knowing that there is truly a better way to connect with others and ourselves. This feeling of being proud, of creating our own destinies that evade and avoid destroying that of another's structures.

That's the supportive reality that no one should suffer, no one should suffer to serve a toxic pattern of generational abuse. And that's what all of us learned, that there is a way to break free from this toxic cycle of sorts. This is an every moment. Work in action.

This is for everybody on Earth. This is something that still is attainable, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done and this is just for humans at all.

Unfortunately, the lifespan of Dr. King's was much too short and and a spark of a revered beam of Dr. Kim was seemingly diminished. But King's legacy does shine as this quote, great beacon light of hope, unquote. That is something he spoke of in his own speech.

This great beacon light of hope. It's out there for everyone who needs it. In very shadowy moments, he knew that it's not a single person that can lead.

It's truly everyone that can find a leader within themselves. That is what makes a true leader. A person that first seeks to improve upon themselves. Someone that doesn't force their flaws onto those around them.

The importance of this day that's dedicated to American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And its welcome as an incredible federally recognized holiday and one that will not be removed from its past, present or future prevalence. Not to me, not to myself, definitely not to my classmates that I grew up with.

And I want to thank Mrs. Purnell so much for being such a great beacon of hope and definitely introducing us to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And happy to birthday Dr. King. This is Teri-Denise and that's my moment of Ripper today. Thanks for tuning in to Ripper.

You can find more about this and other LCC connect podcasts@lccconnect.com.