24th annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice

“There was a time when Dr. King was at the Crozer seminary just outside of Philadelphia,” said Interim President J. Larry Jameson in opening remarks during the 24th annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice. He noted that University records show King audited philosophy classes at Penn during this time, studying the writings of Immanuel Kant and others that helped inform King’s embrace of nonviolent resistance.

“It’s moving and humbling to imagine that a learning experience on this campus might have influenced some of Dr. King’s most significant ideas and actions,” Jameson said. “For those faculty in the audience, you never know who might be in the classes that you’re teaching and how you might influence them.”

With this, Jameson introduced Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, who discussed “Slavery and Genocide: The U.S., Jamaica, and the Historical Sociology of Evil” with Michael Hanchard, the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies.

The Jan. 21 event was co-hosted by the Center for Africana Studies and the Annenberg School for Communication, and attended by students, faculty, staff, and leaders at Penn, including Annenberg School Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wale Adebani, director of the Center for Africana Studies, and Jameson.

Banet-Weiser welcomed guests, noting that the Annenberg School for Communication has co-sponsored the Lecture in Social Justice for 23 years. “It is more important than ever for universities to cherish the interdisciplinary nature of higher education, and in particular to celebrate the intersections between and within Africana Studies, communication, sociology, social justice and anti-racist practice,” she said.

Adebanwi introduced Patterson, whose work looks at the comparative study of slavery. “It is also important for us to continue to wrestle with the impact of slavery and evil in the modern world,” Adebanwi said. “Indeed, Dr. King’s legacy, if we are to take seriously his life’s work, requires us never to forget, and to work towards creating a more perfect union and human world.”

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In his talk, Patterson, a sociologist, unpacked key concepts around slavery, genocide, and ethnocide, comparing the systems of slavery in both the U.S. and Jamaica.

Slavery was “a permanent, dehumanizing affliction,” Patterson said, leading not only to physical violence, but also the destruction of culture and ethnic identity, which he called ethnocide.

While both the U.S. and Jamaican systems of slavery engaged in ethnocide, the Jamaican system was particularly brutal, he said, attributing that to the difference in crops (cotton and tobacco in the U.S. compared to sugar and coffee in Jamaica), the number of enslaved people per slaveholder (10 in the U.S. compared to 120 in Jamaica), and residency (slaveholders in Jamaica were often absentee).

Patterson noted that in spite of the physical and psychological violence, some enslaved people did survive, citing “the remarkable resilience and creative power of Black people in responding to their enslavement and post-emancipation oppression.”

He said, “The enslaved did not passively accept their social death. Everywhere, they resisted, sometimes physically, more often socially, in the communities they fashioned.”

Connecting their lives to the modern era, Patterson said: “Dr. King fought for and defined, in real terms, the true meaning and purpose of freedom.”

“No one has contributed more to the embrace of self-esteem and the figure psychological freedom among Black people everywhere than Dr. Martin Luther King, through his life, his works, his rhetoric and sacrificial death,” he said.

Michael Hanchard is the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Orlando Patterson is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.