Dr. David Kwabena Wilson, president of Morgan State University, earned a standing ovation as a keynote speaker for Utah Valley University’s MLK Commemoration Week.

Speaking in the Grand Ballroom at UVU’s Orem campus, Dr. Wilson spoke of the legacy and unfinished agenda of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “What I am saying to you this morning is that Dr. King chose to light a candle, he did not choose to merely curse the darkness,” Dr. Wilson said.

Dr. Wilson focused on voting rights, noting that King was long an advocate for equal voting rights in an era when Black people in the South were often stripped of their legal rights due to severe race-based discrimination. Dr. Wilson shared that his own parents were unable to vote for much of their lives due to illegal, yet widespread tactics aimed at suppressing Black votes. “We are obliged to actively defend the right of all citizens to vote and all citizens to participate in our cherished and hard-won democracy,” Dr. Wilson said.

As Dr. Wilson reflected on King’s passion for voting rights, he remarked that, at present, many states are implementing voting restrictions affecting low-income and minority populations.

“America truly did not become a fully functioning democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the act that King and countless others fought for with their collective blood, sweat, tears, and deaths,” Wilson said. “The sacred right to vote is clearly under attack, as various states increasingly imagine and then subsequently enact laws that actually create barriers to voter registration, barriers to participation in our democracy.”

Dr. Wilson also spoke of his childhood pursuit of education. As the son of a sharecropper, he was forced to work the cotton fields every day, making it impossible to attend school five days a week for much of elementary school. His family suffered from such severe poverty that they pasted magazine pages to the wall to try and keep the wind out. Dr. Wilson recalls looking at the walls of their shack and slowly learning to read. He said he went around the world in the pages on the walls without ever leaving the humble home. “That is when I began to understand the magical powers of education,” Dr. Wilson said, “and I wanted to taste it.”

After a teacher mentored him, Dr. Wilson set his sights on college. He was accepted to Tuskegee University and became the first person in his family to attend college.

“A lot of hands have gone into the making of who I am and to lead me to a point to where I can say, to Dr. King and to all of those who gave everything, their lives, that you didn’t do that in vain,” Dr. Wilson said.

View the recorded livestream of Dr. David Kwabena Wilson’s keynote speech.