By Mina Rose Morales, Belmont Voice correspondent
Belmont community members gathered at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Community Breakfast on Monday to discuss how his inspiration can be used as a vision for a more just and inclusive future.
Dr. Sophia Boyer, the event’s keynote speaker, is a lifelong educator and executive director who strengthens communities through innovative frameworks that help them collaborate, learn, and create meaningful change. At the event, Boyer used King’s teachings as a map to help community members document the significance of their experience. According to Boyer, by sorting one’s memory, one can decide how to build a better future. The goal is what she calls “freedom dreaming.”
According to Boyer’s program, “…freedom dreaming…[is] a practice rooted in the Black radical tradition and carried forward by Dr. King and generations of movement builders.” By the end of Boyer’s presentation, event attendees will, “…[Name] one freedom dream connected to a community [they] belong to and to identify human-sized steps—habits, conversations, and collaborations—that help make it real.”
Boyer asked participants seated alone to move next to someone. After coming together, she asked audience members to write three things they are grateful for and to share them with the person next to them.
While looking at a picture of King on the projector screen, she reminded guests that people in times of darkness also find joy.
“Nobody’s going to steal my joy,” she said.
King was quoted frequently during Boyer’s presentation, as she used his words to guide her discussion.
In King’s words, “Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.”
Boyer reaffirmed this by asking participants who taught them they’re beautiful, worthy, and somebody. Some people mentioned their childhood friends, others mentioned their parents, and others kept their answers to themselves.
After a guided exercise to revisit memories and reflect on beauty and self-worth, Boyer invited her audience to write down their freedom dream—a moral vision of a more just future. Their freedom dream could be rooted in their identity or a community that matters to them.
Minutes after, Lara Guzman-Hosta, the vice-chair of Belmont Human Rights Commission, shared her hope that a freer future includes the rights of immigrants. Earlier in the event, Select Board Chair Matt Taylor reminded the gathering of Henry Tapia. Tapia was a member of the Afro-Dominican Belmont community and was murdered during a hate crime. Minutes later, Kim Haley Jackson, chair of Belmont’s Human Rights Commission, asked community members to repeat Tapia’s name in his honor.
“Do something. All we can do is do something,” Boyer quotes Grace Lee Boggs, a social activist and scholar.
Participants wrote down doable, everyday actions that could bring their freedom dreams to life. After a morning filled with breakfast, gratitude, speeches from adults and METCO students and parents, choir, community unity, and dreams for the future, the event ended in prayer.
“We’re grateful for the 525,600 minutes,” said Rev. Chris Jablonski, senior minister at the First Church in Belmont Unitarian Universalist.
