CELEBRATING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. WITH THE HARTFORD ALUMNAE CHAPTER OF DELTA SIGMA THETA SORORITY, INC.

By Frederick A. Hurst

On January 21, 2008, Hartford’s Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. held its 23rd Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholarship Breakfast at La Renaissance Banquet facility in Windsor, Connecticut and it was packed. About 700 to 800 people cozily gathered around closely arranged dining tables to feast on a perfect breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes sautéed in pepper and onions and grits so tasty and well cooked that I speculated that the cook must be Black.

I’m beginning to suspect that Black folks in Connecticut do not embrace CP (colored people’s) time. In the past two years I have attended several events in Connecticut, and like all of them, the Delta Breakfast program started exactly on time at 9:00 a.m. and progressed as smoothly as a Broadway production.

Committee Chair, Shirley Williams opened the program and introduced Portia Bachman, Mistress of Ceremony, who guided the audience through the intricacies of Lift Every Voice and Sing, a welcome by Danielle S. Burrell, President of the Hartford Alumnae Chapter, Greetings by State’s Attorney Gail Petteway Hardy and then to the invocation by Reverend Donald Johnson, Sr. and then to the unusually tasty breakfast, which was skillfully served by acrobatic waitresses who politely and patiently weaved through thin aisles and around roaming visitors with precariously balanced trays to serve us all without a visible incident.

After breakfast, Scholarship Committee Chairperson Shirley Harrison recognized the scholarship recipients, 2nd Vice President Miranda Gary recognized the sponsors and Arts and Letters Committee CoChair Rolanda Stone introduced the main speaker, Patricia A. Coulter, President & Chief Executive Officer of the Urban League of Philadelphia, who (after a moving rap poem on Martin Luther King by college student, Victor Kwanza) delivered a smooth discourse on the current crisis among our youth and offered some practical insight into how we each can counter the crisis by redefining “bling” from the “bling” of fancy jewelry, cars, homes and fashion to a “bling” of excellence in math and science and health and promoting college education and knowledge of business, a “bling,” she emphasized, that is focused on “breathing life into new generations” and doing so with, in the words of Martin Luther King, “a fierce sense of urgency now.”

Delta, Theresa Hopkins-Staten (see POV, November 2007), invited my wife and me to the breakfast because she knew that the speaker from Philadelphia was a friend whom we met during a trip that we shared to South Africa. Patricia was pleasantly surprised that we came from Springfield to hear her and was even so kind as to mention us and Point of View in her brief introduction.

By 11:15 a.m., after sharing a celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. that stood out for the richness of its program and the professionalism of its Delta Sorority sponsors, we made our way to the highway and back to Springfield, where we remained in celebration and reflection and enthusiastically cheered Barack Obama on in his debate against Hillary Clinton later that evening. n