“‘Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love,’” Dean of Students Jamele Adams stated at the 11th annual Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on Monday night. The quote, which comes from the event’s namesake, was one of many shared that night by speakers and performers who wished to convey the many aspects of Black history and the Civil Rights movement that King embodied.

Rev. Matthew Carriker, the University’s Protestant chaplain, and Allison Cornelisse, the Catholic chaplain, introduced the event, each sharing words on spirituality and nonviolence.

Adams then took the stage, explaining to the audience that, “every component of this evening is a derivative of words from or shared by things Dr. King has said.”

He also issued the audience a call to action, urging, “Now let us stand as a human community, a campus community. … This means that we have to work out for love. We got to exercise our minds and our decisions in the name of love, with love in our hearts and love in our minds. We have to do some mental and physical pushups, sit ups, stand ups, sit-ins.”

“We gotta continue to be about that life. And that life is a good one,” he added.

Adams also recited some original poetry on Black identity and the Civil Rights movement before Student Union President Nyah Macklin ’16 sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is often referred to as the “Black American National Anthem.” The step team, Platinum, then gave a performance, which featured an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”

Makalani Mack '16 addressed the audience, discussing how Civil Rights leaders King and Malcolm X are often seen as embodying “the yin and yang of Black America.” He also read from X’s speech, “On Protecting Black Women,” stating, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman, the most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”

The Boston Tap Company, led by Sean Fielder, then delivered a series of performances, with Fielder at one point delivering a solo act to King’s “We Shall Overcome” speech.

Amaris Brown ’16, Brontë Velez ’16 and Queen White ’16 approached the podium together to speak to the audience, discussing the male-centric narrative of the history of Black struggle. Brown read the names of several female Civil Rights movement leaders, including Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Angela Davis ’65 and Maya Angelou. “These women were not queens of his dream but visionaries of their own,” Brown stated. She added that the women named “challenged the notion of isolated struggle and single leadership.”

Velez elaborated that, “The absence of these women’s stories are a result of our inability to understand that racism is a symptom of power. Race structures that are maintained by the patriarchy and that we must address in our fight for freedom, even within the black community at large. The way this history is recited and remembered assigns a timeline that indexes the crusade for Civil Rights as beginning and ending with the efforts and dreams of Martin Luther King. We have yet to commit ourselves to the task of learning the histories of the women and queer folk who fought for freedom alongside Dr. King, and we most certainly have overlooked the labor of the women who fought before him.”

The Civil Rights movement, she added, is “a movement that did not end at MLK’s death.”

White concluded, “The future depends on these marginalized people for transitions, authorship and work to enable this country to merit its most ugliest truth. Our ugly truth is that black women are denied the space to live out their lives.”

After a performance from hip hop dance troupe Kaos Kids, Tremaine Smith ’18 — whom Adams dubbed the “embodiment” of King — read King’s 1964 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. “I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice,” he read. “I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. … After contemplation, I conclude that this award … is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time — the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

Adams then introduced the evening’s final speaker, filmmaker and journalist Clennon L. King. King, who is not related to the event’s namesake, noted that his recent documentary, “Passage at St. Augustine,” had been in the works for 13 years before he completed it in 2015. He added that part of what inspired him to finish the documentary was Google’s selection of his partner, Boston artist Ekua Holmes, for the creation of the 2015 MLK Day doodle, which depicted King’s march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. King also noted that his subject matter, the Civil Rights Movement in St. Augustine, Fla., can be considered “the Black Lives Matter Movement of 1964.”

The film was then screened for the audience, showing various clips of archival footage and interviews with Civil Rights leaders who had been involved in St. Augustine. Particularly impactful scenes include those when a hotel manager is seen pouring acid into a pool that young black individuals are swimming in and when police officers in St. Augustine use cattle prods to manage crowds of demonstrators.

After the screening, King once again addressed the audience, noting that the Civil Rights movement “was about our ability to follow our tax dollars to wherever they were being spent.”

He added that segregation acted as a “firewall” to these efforts, “making relevant what was irrelevant, which was our skin color.”

“It was never about holding hands with white people,” King elaborated. “It’s no different than what happened in downtown Boston with the Tea Party. They were being taxed and they weren’t being represented.”

A brief question-and-answer session followed King’s discussion.