Opinion| Beyond the MLK Holiday: Reflections on Community Engagement, Social Responsibility, and PVAMU’s Legacy

The Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) National Holiday provides all Americans with an opportunity to reflect and refocus our energies on solving the issues profoundly impacting American society. Indeed, much uncertainty looms around American citizen's social, economic, and political existences going into this new year. Although we are enduring global conflicts, plagues, and pestilence, we all continue to hope for better days, just as King did.

Dr. King expressed his hope by committing to a life of service and insisting that our American democracy provide all citizens with first-class rights. Dr. King emphatically lamented, "Seek to serve, and your life will be filled with more joy than you can imagine." King's clarion call to service and improving the human condition has always been central to the mission and historical legacy of Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU).

From the University's early days operating as Alta Vista Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for Colored Youth, service to the community was central to the school's mission. Prairie View's Agriculture Department served as the state agency for distributing extension and home demonstration services to black and brown communities during the Jim Crow Era. The services offered by extension workers and home demonstration agents promoted agricultural production and healthy homes. Subsequently, this work was instrumental in sustaining minority communities and providing a measure of insulation from the violence and rampant racial inequalities that shaped black life during the Segregation Era in Texas. PVAMU's long-held tradition of community engagement with black and brown communities profoundly shaped the educational and economic destinies of both communities.

PVAMU served as the State of Texas administrative home for black education by hosting an Annual "Negro Education Conference." The conference sessions explored issues impacting black communities across Texas, and participants proposed solutions. The aforementioned examples of community engagement provide the historical foundation on which PVAMU's commitment to social responsibility is built - a significant theme of the University's 2035 Strategic Plan.

PVAMU's 2035 Journey to Eminence Strategic Plan, initiated by current President Dr. Tomikia LeGrande, bolsters the University's tradition of community engagement through its focus on social responsibility. Likewise, the preservation and community service work underway through the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice is one of the key areas supporting this work. Social responsibility is central to all that we do in the Simmons Center; all of our efforts and programming are student-centered and involve community engagement. Current Simmons Center projects, such as the University study on the legacy of slavery and the impact of segregation at PVAMU, Considering Rural Communities and Issues through Socially Responsible Computing, and the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women Initiative, are centered on promoting social responsibility. The projected outcomes of these projects promote "constructive social change" and will "influence public policy on the local, state, national, and international levels." Both are significant areas of King's work.

Today, we pause to recognize Dr. King's work, life, and commitment to service. King's dream only becomes a reality through our individually and collectively fulfilling the obligation of service to all mankind. Most importantly, as we move beyond the King Holiday and approach the 150^th Anniversary of the founding of PVAMU, let us rediscover our undying vigor for making our communities better and rekindle our commitment to improving the human condition.

Dr. Marco Robinson is an associate professor of history and assistant director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University.

Sources:

Southern Communities of Color and University Relations at a HBCU: An Examination of the History of Community Relations and Recent Faculty Community Engagement Activities at Prairie View A &M University, Special Issue of Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South v. 30, n. 1 (Spring 2023).

Engaging the Public with and Preserving the History of Texas's first Public Historically Black University. KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies X(X): X DOI,: https://kula.uvic.ca/articles/10.5334/kula.33/, 2018.

From Slavery to Freedom in Texas: https://txdstproject.org/