Reflections on a Holiday

As we prepare for a winter storm this weekend, I’m writing to share my remarks from this Monday, which was the federal holiday observing the birth of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. The prompt I was given was to reflect on what the holiday means to Carrboro and to me in one to two minutes as people gathered before marching from Peace and Justice Plaza to First Baptist. I was honored to be given that challenge. Here are my remarks as prepared.

My name is Cristóbal Palmer, and I am a member of the Carrboro Town Council. I speak only for myself today, but I come before you to reflect on what a federal holiday celebrating the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. means to Carrboro.

We look backward while moving forward to answer the question of what MLK Day means, and I’ll spoil the ending for you: we listen to Black women.

We look backward to 1960,

• the year of MLK’s first visit here,
• the year of the first Black student at Carrboro elementary, and
• the year the Chapel Hill Nine sat at a whites-only lunch counter, advised and encouraged by a young Hilliard Caldwell, who would later serve four terms on what was then called the Carrboro Board of Aldermen.

We look back to 1969 and the election of Braxton Foushee as the first Black Alderman in Carrboro.

We look back to 1977, when Robert Drakeford became Carrboro’s first Black mayor. More than anyone else, we have him to thank for the fare-free Chapel Hill Transit.

Personally, I look back to 1983, both the year of my birth and the year that MLK Day became a federal holiday.

These and many other connections, many deep and intertwined roots of the civil rights and labor struggles of the last century, run through Carrboro, where we are determined to break the pattern that the late Yonni Chapman called Diversity without Justice.

So I am honored to stand here today and call Carrboro my home, and I am proud to say that what MLK Day means is that we keep marching ahead. We listen not just to the words of a tremendous orator whose dream we keep working to make real. I want you to note that every name I’ve used so far is a man’s name.

We listen to Coretta Scott King.

We listen to Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman – I have copies of her book here, and I hope you’ll reach out to me – I want to do a book club about this book: “The Double Tax: How Women of Color are Overcharged and Underpaid.”

We listen to Mayor Barbara Foushee.

We listen to Orange County Commissioner Phyllis Portie-Ascott

Listen and keep marching forward. Thank you.