MLK speaker urges students to question 'comfort and convenience'

Grand Valley alumna Shannon Cohen told an audience of mostly students that she didn't learn about equity and justice only in college classes.

"It started with the leaders and family who surrounded me," Cohen said. "I always go back to the lessons that were rooted in my soul."

Cohen spoke January 23 in the Kirkhof Center, as part of Grand Valley's week of events commemorating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is the founder and principal of Shannon Cohen, Inc., a boutique firm specializing in providing emotional health strategies to leaders and difference makers. 

She relayed a tweet by King's daughter, Bernice, stating her father was not born Dr. King, but rather inspired by "the life of Christ and by leaders in his family and community."

"Dr. King had no idea he would leave such a legacy while he was a student at Morehouse College. He was an average person shaped by a series of events," Cohen said.

Cohen said while she was a student at Grand Valley in the mid-1990s, she made a conscious decision to be a "disrupter" and work to change systems of racial hierarchy. She urged students to do the same.

"If you do not start to question the comfort and convenience of the situations that surround you, you will never break the silence," she said. "Who pays the cost when I don't do a thing?"

MLK Commemoration Week events continue Thursday, January 24, with an event sponsored by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. Historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf will present "Jefferson, Slavery, and the Moral Imagination" at 7 p.m. in the Eberhard Center. Visit gvsu.edu/mlk for details.