Keeping the dream alive

In an assembly that paid tribute to the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School were reminded that one individual, committed to making a difference, can be a powerful force in keeping King’s ideals alive.

The Jan. 12 assembly commemorated King’s legacy of social justice by honoring two individuals who, in their careers or volunteer work, exemplify his ideals of service to mankind.

David Pedulla, son of Sudbury residents Barbara and Joseph Pedulla, and a 2000 graduate of L-S, received the Award of Promise for his work as an advocate for the poor.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Award was presented to Dr. Thea James, an emergency room physician and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

James told the students that the MLK award was even more meaningful to her because it was bestowed by high school students.

“These kids are so impressionable and if they are aware of these issues now it is a positive sign for our future. It’s the right time to grab them and impel them forward to do something about social justice and inequality,” said James. “These kids will become the very institutions who will wipe out injustice.”

The awards assembly is sponsored by the Martin Luther King (MLK) Action Project, a community service club founded at the school in 1987.

The MLK Action Project sends student volunteers to soup kitchens, food banks and senior citizen centers, funds scholarships for AIDS orphans at a girls’ school in Uganda through its annual Jimmy Mack March, and sends a group to a Habitat for Humanity project every year during February vacation. The club was named the Greater Boston Food Bank’s Volunteer of the Year in 2005.

More than 25 percent of the school population contributes to MLK club-sponsored volunteer projects and students contribute more than 3,600 service hours during the school year.

His student involvement with the MLK Action Project, said Pedulla, had “a huge impact on my desire to give back to society.”

“The trajectory of my work over the past few years was nurtured by the experiences, education and role models I got at Lincoln-Sudbury,” said Pedulla, who called King one of the greatest figures in American history. “In high school I was very much involved with the service model, making sure people had food and clothing. Once I got to college I got interested in the underlying causes of these issues.”

Pedulla, a 2004 graduate of Boston College, now works at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York City. He coordinates local and national public policy campaigns to improve access to justice for low-income people through coalition-building, research, education and lobbying.

“‘Community service’ has become a popular catch-phrase,” said Pedulla, with volunteer hours required by high schools and sought in college applications. “But is this — meeting people’s immediate needs — really what Dr. King had in mind? Our service must not end at feeding those who are hungry and housing those who do not have homes, although that’s a start.”

Pedulla urged the L-S students to become politically and socially active to address “what is going on in society to create these needs and to see what we can do as a society to remedy these injustices.”

James was presented with the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for “the compassion she shows to all human beings,” said the student who presented the medal.

In addition to her work as an emergency room physician in Boston, James has participated in humanitarian missions at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti and in the U.S. and Iran as a member of the International Medical Surgical Response Team.

James quoted King, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane,” and asked the students to name the number one reason for health care disparities in the United States.

In 1999 Congress asked the Institute of Medicine to study the reasons for health care disparity. The resulting report, “Unequal Treatment,” said James “found minorities were less likely to receive appropriate treatment for diseases or appropriate referrals when all else was equal. Over and over doctors would choose a lower standard of treatment for minority patients. There were these disparities in all areas of health care.”

“What shapes our behavior? It’s all about culture. That becomes the lens through which you see everything,” she said. “One half to three quarters of white Americans perceive minorities as less intelligent, prone to violence and preferring to live off welfare.”

The MLK awards assembly, which included tributes to King, performance by the L-S Step Dancers, drummers and the singing group Accent, was initiated by the MLK Action Project in the 1988. The MLK Award was first presented that year, and the Award of Promise, an honor for an L-S graduate who is least five years out of high school, was instituted in 2002.

“Martin Luther King said, ‘Anyone can be great because anyone can serve,’” said Pedulla, but he urged the students to take that service a step further and work to achieve social justice, an effort that “requires risks, courage and passion.”

“We are the next generation. I hope that we will move forward, challenging the status quo, and making sure that the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King lives in each of us,” he said.