The annual event recognizes alumni volunteers and helps further the FUAA’s mission to foster lifelong connections among alumni and promote a sense of general goodwill and support for Fordham worldwide.

Sally Benner, FCRH ’84, chair of the FUAA Advisory Board, introduced new and returning board members, 24 volunteers who represent the University’s 200,000-plus global alumni worldwide. They include graduates from 10 Fordham schools, including Marymount and Thomas More College, and their class years span six decades. Quoting another graduate, Benner said the group aims “to serve as connective tissue—to connect us to each other, to connect you to the University, and to connect the University to you.”

As she spoke about the Fordham community and its commitment to cura personalis, or care for the whole person, Benner noted that the alumni were gathering during a week in which “the world commemorates the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.”—and less than two weeks after a fire killed 17 people and injured dozens of others in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, a mere 15-minute walk from the Rose Hill campus.

She shared how she is motivated by a quote from King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “’We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly,’” she said, quoting King. “Tonight, I ask our alumni community to consider care for the whole person to include care for our communities.”

Benner encouraged alumni to seek out Julie Gafney, Ph.D., executive director of the University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who was in attendance with a list, now posted on the center’s Instagram account, of how victims of the fire felt the Fordham community could offer support.

“If you have the means to share your abundance, by contributing your skills or good fortune to help, you will learn how the largely Gambian community would value it most,” Benner said.

A Legacy of Transformation

This year’s FUAA reception also marked the last one for Joseph M. McShane, S.J., before he steps down as president of Fordham in June. Throughout the evening, on a big screen behind the ballroom stage, the FUAA featured a slideshow highlighting the University’s transformation under his leadership since 2003. Prior to the event, attendees had an opportunity to submit their own personal tributes and memorable McShane moments, which were included in the slideshow.

During his own speech, Father McShane thanked Benner, who stepped into her role as chair just this year, for “organizing us this evening and doing it with her characteristic class.”

He also remarked on the University’s strength as it continues to navigate the pandemic, noting that the Class of 2025 is “the largest, most diverse, and brightest class in Fordham’s 180-year history,” and that 2021 was the “best fundraising year” in the University’s history, thanks to the “extraordinary generosity” of alumni and others who invested more than $84 million in the University and its mission.

“We didn’t just get through,” he said. “Fordham came through with great strength because it was true to its sense of mission, and its mission and its heart is a mission that is based on love and directed toward the cultivation of all the gifts that students have—cura personalis, in other words.”

The FUAA is always looking to connect with new voices from the University’s alumni community. For info on its upcoming events or to learn more, visit Forever Fordham.

Over the years, I have told our students that I want them to graduate from Fordham bothered by injustice. That word, injustice, has taken on more weight in the last several years, as many Americans have—too belatedly—come to realize how pervasive injustice is when it comes to issues of race in this country.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew it  and he preached and wrote about it with painful clarity, perhaps nowhere so pointedly as in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“… when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…”

This was not about Justice with a capital J, nor a lofty philosophical argument (though Dr. King could make those like no one else), but a moment of shared pain between a father and daughter. It was not an occasion for analysis, but an invitation to empathy.

I believe that the ability to sit with another’s pain is what makes us fully human. To recognize that pain is to be moved to action. The struggle for full equality in our country for Black people is far from over, and perhaps has even been set back by the pandemic, which has disproportionately affected people of color. Likewise, while Fordham has made strides in combating racism and moving toward true equity and justice (thanks to many of you reading this letter), we still have much work to do.

I promise you that that work goes on. It may seem sometimes to be overshadowed by other events in the life of the University, but our resolve to live up to Fordham’s Jesuit calling to be people for others remains strong. We may best honor Dr. King by continuing his work, and by emulating his devotion to the cause of racial justice.

May God bless you all, this day and every day.

Sincerely,
Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

Local nonprofit Phipps Neighborhoods, which aims to help youth and families overcome poverty, partnered with Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, Office of Multicultural Affairs, and Office of the Chief Diversity Officer to host the event. More than 300 attendees, many of them young Bronx residents who participate in Phipps Neighborhoods programs, braved frigid temperatures to gather at the McGinley Center and reflect on how King’s message can inform contemporary activists.

“We’re happy to broaden the conversation beyond the details of Martin Luther King’s life so that we can have some serious, courageous conversation about how we can continue that legacy for justice,” said Mark L. Chapman, Ph.D., a professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, who moderated a panel discussion at the event.

A ‘Clarion Call’ to Today’s Activists

Dianne Morales, executive director and CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods, said the event’s theme, “Courageous Conversation in Action: Creating Brave Spaces to Stand for Justice,” reflected the importance of commemorating King’s life and work with discussions that “spotlight issues where struggle is still needed,” such as racial inequities in education and employment.

In her opening remarks, Morales said King “was focused on the need for all of us to call out racism, discrimination, and inequality—to take this country to task and create change in the systems and institutions that perpetuate those disparities in our communities.”

She said that by having these conversations and working to fight these injustices, we honor his spirit.

“We recognize, moreover, that his clarion call is as relevant today as when he walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965,” she said.

Intergenerational Lessons

In his keynote speech, the Rev. Dr. C. Vernon Mason reminded the audience that King was just 26 years old when he played a pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“I don’t want anyone to leave here today thinking Dr. King was an elder,” Mason said. “Dr. King was a very young person. Don’t let old folks tell you that you’ve got to be old to do something.”

Mason, a visiting professor at the New York Theological Seminary, drew on his own experience as a civil rights attorney in reminding older attendees that bridging generational divides is essential to carrying on the work of the civil rights movement. “Young people have something to teach us, and we certainly have something to share with them,” he said.

A panel discussion moderated by Chapman featured community leaders at the forefront of today’s civil rights struggles, including Hawk Newsome, chair of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter; criminal justice reform advocate Vidal Guzman; and Yaniyah Pearson, director of restorative practices and equity initiatives at the New York nonprofit Ramapo for Children.

In response to a question from Chapman about mentorship, panelist Nakita Vanstory, the director of Justice Community and Justice PLUS Programs at LaGuardia Community College, said she often finds inspiration in the young people she works with. “When I feel like giving up or I feel like I’m not making a difference, I think of all the people who are silently mentoring me and I think about the difference that I’ve made in my students,” she said. “That’s where I get my motivation.”

Community Partnerships: A Foundation for Change

Arto Woodley, executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said the event and the conversation it inspired are “at the core” of Fordham’s mission. But, he cautioned, “Having the conversation starts the process, but by no means ends the process.” He added that working with neighbors such as Phipps Neighborhoods will help the Fordham community meet the challenge of translating intellectual discussion into concrete action and leadership.

“Our goal is that this event is beginning of something we’ll do on an annual basis,” Woodley said.

Morales said that for Phipps Neighborhoods, the collaborative nature of the event reflected “the role that the campus and University can and should play in lifting up the voices of the community it resides in.”

Engaging with the local community held special importance for Charlotte Hakikson, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who grew up nearby in the Bronx. “I’ve always enjoyed when we have events that invite the community to our campus and allow students to interact with the community that they’re living in,” she said.

Hakikson, a theology and African American studies major, said she was excited to see young people from the neighborhood at the event because she believes it is important for students to be exposed to King’s teachings and consider how those lessons can be applied today. “He’d say that there’s more work to do,” she said. “He’d still be fighting for more equity.”

–Michael Garofalo

For writer, lawyer, and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander, the letter’s reverberations in the present day are clear. Reading King’s letter in advance of an Oct. 24 event at Fordham, Alexander found it “powerful and disturbing in many ways—how relevant it remains at this moment in history.”

Alexander joined the Rev. Bryan Massingale, the James and Nancy Buckman Professor of Theological and Social Ethics, before a packed audience at the Leonard Theater of Fordham Preparatory School for a poignant and at times pointed conversation on race and racism, framed around the lasting legacy of King’s message.

In rereading the letter for the first time in many years, Alexander said she was struck by King’s conception of nonviolent direct action as a method for “creating environments of tension in which a stark choice must be made.”

Mass Incarceration: ‘A Caste-Like System’

Alexander laid out the case for just such a stark choice to be made in her 2010 book on America’s criminal justice system, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Of her work on mass incarceration, Alexander said, “I became obsessed with trying to kind of wake people up to see what our nation had done again—that we had managed to birth a new caste-like system in America and that it had happened on our watch, even as people who claimed to care about racial and social justice, for the most part, stood idly by.”

Alexander’s mention of idle bystanders took on added significance in the context of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which King addressed those who, “In the midst of blatant injustices… stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

The event, titled This Decisive Hour: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Theological Vision in a “Colorblind” Age, was the inaugural Fordham Theology 1000 First-Year Experience Lecture. The forum aims to bring together each of the approximately 2,500 Fordham undergraduates enrolled in the first-year theology course Faith and Critical Reason around a common topic. Students had studied King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in class before the lecture.

A Political and Spiritual Question

The political and the transcendent are intertwined in Alexander’s conception of justice. “The challenge of American democracy, in my view, is a spiritual challenge,” she said.

Father Massingale agreed. “The core spiritual, moral challenge posed to us by mass incarceration, by racism, by systems of racial control,” he said, comes down to this question: “Do we have the will to care for someone who does not look like us?”

Or, in Alexander’s framing: “Is this what you would wish for yourself if you were poor and hungry?”

“If the answer is no, then we have a responsibility at that point,” she continued. “And I think many of us avoid the question because we don’t want the responsibility that that question implies—the responsibility of actually having to do something to change it.” In the process we must reflect inward and confront hard truths, Alexander said, including truths we find convenient to ignore. This notion of responsibility, she noted, lies at the heart not just of Christianity, but of many of the world’s faiths.

This aspect of Alexander’s message resonated with Ally Lambie, a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “She talked about how some of us are ignorant to what’s going on and it made me realize that I’m sometimes one of those people,” Lambie said after the lecture. “Now I’m going to go out and try harder to understand where other people are coming from.”

‘Our Time Is Limited’

In his letter, King wrote, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

Like King before her, Alexander finds resolve in the knowledge that our time is limited and our future is unwritten. “For me, it’s a deeply spiritual question,” she said. “Who do we want to be and what do we want our lives to be about in the short period of time we’re here on Earth?”

–Michael Garofalo

To kick off week two of Black History Month, Greer spoke with Inside Fordham about the growing diversity of black ethnicity in the United States and how this has influenced the annual commemoration of black history.

IF: How has black ethnicity diversified in the United States?

CMG: There are three major black ethnic groups in the United States—black Americans who were involuntary immigrants to the country, African-Caribbean immigrants, and African immigrants, both of whom came via voluntary immigration. These groups differ greatly in their cultures, occupations, languages, and their histories.

Initially, though, their one shared identity is their skin color. So, when African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrive here, they realize that, for better or worse, their fates are intertwined with that of black Americans. Even though they came in pursuit of better opportunities in a country that is ostensibly free and equal for all, African and Caribbean immigrants are finding that that’s not always the case for them here in the United States.

How do these various ethnic groups experience black history in America?

Black History Month started in 1926 with Carter G. Woodson commemorating the accomplishments of black Americans—most of whom have done the impossible with literally nothing. My argument in the book is that as we diversify as group of black people living in the United States, we should take note of the accomplishments of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans living here and abroad, making the African diaspora history more complete.

Do our current celebrations of Black History Month incorporate the experiences of foreign-born blacks as well as American blacks?

They do, but this needs to be done better. Oftentimes, Black History Month celebrates the same core group of people—for instance, in school almost everyone learns about Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. Granted, these are four black Americans who have made some of the greatest strides for the struggle, but there are literally millions more. So we need to go beyond our comfort zone in choosing whom to celebrate every year.

Similarly, we should use this month to celebrate people of African or Caribbean descent, and even those who didn’t immigrate to the United States. If we’re going to talk about Shirley Chisholm, for example, the first black woman in Congress, we can link her to the larger black American struggle while also highlighting the fact that she’s Afro-Caribbean.

Here at Fordham, we also can use this as an opportunity to look at the diverse populations we have on campus and to think about new ways we can include and celebrate all the different groups of African descent.

Is Black History Month a unifying experience for the various black ethnic groups in America?

It can be and it should be—but I also think it should be unifying experience for all Americans. Yes, this is a month during which we look at the accomplishments of black people, but these are also Americans’ accomplishments. I think we do a disservice if we only celebrate this history as belonging to one group of people, when it is in fact part of the entire fabric of American history.