By Kristin DiBiase, JD
The King County Bar Association (KCBA) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Luncheon Committee is pleased to announce that the Annual MLK Jr. Celebration Luncheon will take place in person on Friday, January 17, 2025, at the Seattle Convention Center from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm. The committee warmly welcomes the keynote speaker for this year’s luncheon, Marsha Currin McGriff, Ed.D, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. McGriff earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and her master’s degree in education from Tuskegee University, and her Doctor of Education in Interdisciplinary Leadership from Creighton University. A veteran higher education leader, she has dedicated her career to advancing systemic cross-cultural equity and implementing the tools of inclusive excellence.
The Luncheon, established in 1992 by the then-named Seattle-King County Bar Association, was intended to commemorate Dr. King’s birthday, as both a testament to the enduring values that he represented and a reminder of the centrality of the law and lawyers to the Civil Rights Movement. Today, our polarizing political climate presents difficult obstacles that could stymie progress and erode the hard-won civil rights battles that Dr. King and his contemporaries worked tirelessly to achieve. In the face of these challenges, Dr. McGriff and her message are a poignant representation of what we are striving to uphold.
In January 2024, the Florida Board of Governors and Board of Education sent a shock wave rippling through the higher education and legal communities as the first state to pass restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), defined by them as “any program, campus activity, or policy that classifies individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification;” as well as on political or social activism, identified by the boards as “any activity organized with a purpose of effecting or preventing change to a government policy, action, or function, or any activity intended to achieve a desired result related to social issues, where the university endorses or promotes a position in communications, advertisements, programs, or campus activities.”
By March 1 of the same year, Dr. McGriff, then the Chief Diversity Officer and Senior Advisor to the President at the University of Florida, was suddenly in the news. On that day, university administrators—who not even three years earlier had proudly trumpeted her appointment to the role—released a memo notifying the public that in compliance with the regulations on prohibited expenditures, Gator Nation had “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”
In just four short paragraphs, 13 staff positions and 15 diversity-related faculty administrative appointments were terminated, leaving Dr. McGriff and other equity and inclusion professionals at the institution out of a job, with 12 weeks’ severance to find new employment among other open university roles or go elsewhere.
With deep experience and a proven track record in previous equity roles at Ball State University and Indiana University, Dr. McGriff remained undaunted. Less than two weeks later, she was right here in Seattle at the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) Annual Conference and receiving our highest honor: the 2024 Individual Leadership award.
As NADOHE members, many of us, me included, had come to the conference with a keen desire simply to be in each other’s company. To a bunch of DEI practitioners looking for solidarity at a time that our very profession was under fire, the conference theme of “PERSIST” was feeling like a balm. After giving a rousing acceptance to more than 1,100 equity and inclusion professionals, Marsha Currin McGriff received a well-deserved standing ovation from the crowd—and in that moment, applauding so hard that my palms were stinging, I knew I was gazing at this year’s MLK Luncheon keynote speaker.
In nations on the brink of autocracy, we see certain elements in common: misinformation and disinformation that sow seeds of distrust in the democratic system as a whole; the restriction, recission and over-regulation of individual rights; and the prohibition and criminalization of disparate views. Often, the earliest embers of these subversive changes are targeted and fanned into flame toward our educational systems, because the progenitors of these plans recognize that our schools and universities—places of learning and expanding people’s worldviews—are the places where “dangerous” ideas of justice and truth can spread. Now more than ever, our nation and the very idea of democracy are approaching a tipping point, and fighting to advance Dr. King’s deeper vision of equity remains critical.
To embody Dr. King’s legacy of pursuing equity, social justice, and economic justice for all, we must fight against the erosion of democracy itself. Complacency as a nation endangers us all—our democracy remains fragile, and even those principles and freedoms we consider settled and most dear can be at risk if we rest on the laurels of our past civil rights accomplishments. What happened in Florida is a cautionary tale for all of us; it illustrates the importance of remaining vigilant for justice. But with her scholarly focus on the intersection of race and gender in politics, I believe Dr. McGriff also makes a convincing case that Black women just might save the world if we let them.
Please mark your calendars for Friday, January 17, 2025, from 12:00 pm–1:30 pm at the Seattle Convention Center. The MLK Luncheon Committee looks forward to hearing Dr. McGriff’s powerful message as an educator whose vocation reinforces all that is central to the perfection of our democracy. We hope you will join us for a stirring reinforcement and recommitment to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy.
Kristin DiBiase, JD is Associate Dean of Student Life, Diversity & Inclusion at Seattle University School of Law. She is a member of NADOHE and the Annual Meeting of Law School Diversity Professionals (AMDiP).
