This year, the event was on the Thursday, January 17th before Martin Luther King Jr. day because the organizer, Korey Nuckolls, planned on going to President Obama’s inauguration around the actual time of Martin Luther King Jr. day.
The theme of the event changes each year - this year it was “Remembering our past, creating a better future.” The goal of the event was to get students more involved and to keep the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. alive.
During this event, students come together and read essays and poems, sing songs, celebrate diversity. Students can write essays and submit them in a contest and the winning essays are read during the event. The choir performs songs especially for the event and they try to showcase as much diversity as possible. They want to promote King’s idea of having more civil rights for everyone – and what better place to do it than the very diverse Novi?
Since Novi is such a diverse community, the celebration of our civil rights is perfect. Everyone in Novi is so comfortable talking about race – it will actually probably turn out to be such a surprise when we go off to college and find out that everyone isn’t as accepting of race as we are. It will be such a weird change to go to another place and find people who aren’t as accepting as we are, who don’t celebrate race, instead they discriminate against it.
When we end up somewhere else, we can always be grateful for the vast experience to race that we have had our whole lives. We have grown up with a very diverse community, become very accustomed to people openly talking about it. To us, being Asian or African American is just something as common as having being a blonde or brunette. Sure, we still have the stereotypes and everything and everyone may not be as open minded as our high school is, but we have it pretty good.
Novi’s diversity helps us in more ways than just being open minded - it will make us better people in the future since we have learned to accept others no matter what their skin color may be.