Four Honored at Martin Luther King Day Program

“What are you doing for others?”

That, according to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is “life’s most persistent and urgent question.”

Some 70 people gathered Monday at the to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day and to see how four particular individuals in the Woburn community are answering that question.

The audience and guests came together for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., scholarship luncheon, a cooperative effort of , the and which aims to connect citizens to strengthen the community.

High school students Zeba Hashimi and Joshua Johnson each received a scholarship.

Adults Paul Medeiros and Stanley Swann III received Drum Major awards, Medeiros on behalf of the city, Swann, the church. The awards are so named based on a sermon by King. In that sermon, Rev. Dr. King said that “we should seek to be out front in things that truly matter,” according to the luncheon program.

Community service is the theme that unites the scholarship and award winners.

After she encountered King’s “What are you doing for others?” quote, Hashimi, a senior at , decided to volunteer at a hospital in a rural village in southern India, according to her scholarship application essay. She has also volunteered at Winchester Hospital, accumulating 500 hours of service.

“I share Dr. King’s dream of ‘readying oneself’ to engage courageously, passionately and intelligently for transformative action,” Hashimi wrote in her application essay.

She plans to study chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University and become a chemical engineer. Based on her work in India, she plans to “develop, manufacture drugs and yield cost-effective treatments that are relevant to the needs of the global society.”

Johnson has grown up as a member of St. John’s Church. He has sung in several choirs at St. John’s and in Cambridge. A senior at Leominster High School, he has been involved in his school’s Get Involved in Volunteer Experience program and captains the school’s varsity indoor track team. He hopes to study communications in college.

"The power of the written and spoken words, can keep (social) issues in the front of our elected public officials, and society, until solutions can be discovered and implemented for the good of all citizens," Johnson wrote in his application essay. "The moment we stop talking about these vital issues, lives will continue to end."

Scholarships embody the dream of Dr. King, so students can change the world, said mistress of ceremonies Annette Hall.

Medeiros, a former Ward 5 alderman for 14 years, got involved with the environmental group FACE (For a Cleaner Environment) in the late 1980s, according to Mayor Scott Galvin, who presented Medeiros with his award. Medeiros was instrumental in establishing city recycling programs. He established an electronics and appliance recycling program that netted $72,000 to benefit local nonprofit organizations.

Medeiros volunteers as a member of the Woburn Cable Advisory Committee and continues to volunteer on Woburn’s new Agricultural Committee, "which is now working," the program states,  to establish and maintain sustainable agricultural and recreational programs" at the Spence Farm property, which the city recently purchased.

Swann chairs the Board of Trustees of St. John’s Baptist Church. A musician by profession, he has been a member of the church for more than 10 years and chaired the board for the past several years. 

A retired veteran of the US Air Force Band, he won first place in the US Air Force worldwide talent show competition, according to the luncheon program.  A drummer for musicals in Boston and Cambridge  he gives drum lessons to church members and plays the drums every Sunday at church. He also founded a jazz day camp in Lowell.

Volunteerism is a key part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, said Galvin.

David Crowley, president of SCI, directed the audience to a list of organizations that could use volunteers.

Instead of speeches at the luncheon, a number of youths from the church and church trustee Albert Newton acted out three scenarios scripted by church member Toni Walker that all asked the question, “What would Martin think or do?” about an issue raised in each scene. Why dress appropriately? Why learn history? Could it be true that a black man was elected president?

“He looks like me,” said Newton, in the person of King, of Barack Obama.

Newton then read from Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Portraying King was “enriching,” Newton said afterwards. Ending the presentation with a picture and words of Obama shows that Kings’s dream "remains alive," Newton said.

“Nothing better.”

Without King’s leadership as a “drum major for peace, there would be no President Barack Obama,” MLK event chairman Ron Walker wrote in the program.

Glenn Hiltpold, a member of St. John’s Baptist Church and resident of Wakefield, took the day off from work Monday to see his children perform in one of the three scenarios. His daughter, Destiny, 7 ½, knew that the reason for all the activity Monday was “because Martin Luther King’s birthday is today.”

Her brother, Kendell, who also performed, credited King with getting blacks treated the same way as whites—in his words, not having to sit at the back of the bus.

Sharea Cyprian of Woburn, a member of St. John’s Baptist Church, attended the luncheon for the third year. The lessons she has learned, she said, are not to use anger and to respect other people, no matter where they come from.

Alaina Huxtable of Woburn attended the luncheon for her first time. A self-described activist, she was involved, she said, in the civil rights movement, specifically the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She said she met Martin Luther King Jr. and described him as charismatic. Her husband, Peter, said he had just finished reading King’s “Letters from a Birmingham jail.”  He described the work as “really powerful.”

King was “more about love than anything else,” said the church’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Neal Pearson.

The luncheon ended with all members of the audience joined, hand to hand in a circle around the room, singing and swaying to “”We shall overcome.”