Champaign MLK Event Speaker Discusses His Legacy, Ferguson, New York Deaths

To mark the Monday holiday, we're hearing from a man with a remarkable legacy to uphold.  The keynote speaker at last Friday’s Martin Luther King Countywide Celebration in Champaign - Kenneth Morris Jr. is the great-great-great grandson of Frederick Douglass - and the great-great grandson of Booker T. Washington.

His grandfather was Frederick Douglass the Third, Frederick Douglass' great-grandson.  His grandfather, Nettie Hancock Washington, was Booker T. Washington's granddaughter. 

His grandparents met in 1941 at Tuskegee University (which Washington founded in 1881.)

"They were rushing across campus, and literally bumped into each other," he said.  "(They) didn't know the other descended from a historic family.  They fell in love at first sight, and wound up getting married three months later.  So it was no accident that I'm doing this work today, and no accident that my grandparents ran into each other on that fateful day."

But Morris said it wasn’t until he was in his 30’s, with a family and successful advertising career, that he discovered his true calling.

A friend showed him a 2005 National Geographic article on human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. 

Morris said that inspired him to build upon the platform his ancestors had built, and start the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, an education campaign targeted at young people.

He said the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, Missouri and New York,  and the protests that resulted, show we still have work to do.

"These are things that are fresh in our mind right now, because they just happened," he said.  "But what causes these types of tragedies, the systemic incidents in communities of racism, lack of equality, and all of the things we see bubbling to the surface right now, it's really important that we celebrate legacies of great people, and Dr. King and my ancestors because it reminds me of where we've come from.  It reminds everybody that history is important for a lot of reasons, but I think history is most important because we need to know where we've come from in order to know where we're headed.  So a celebration like this (Friday's event in Champaign) is an opportunity for everybody to celebrate great legacies like Dr. King's, but also remember the past, remember how far we've come, but also how far we still have to go."

Morris now dedicates his life to educating young people about human traffking, which he says ensnares every race in the human family.

"At that moment when I read that (National Geographic) article, I understood that I had this platform," he said.  "That my ancestors had built through struggle, and through sacrifice, and I could really leverage the historical significance of my ancestry to do something about this."