‘The job ahead must be massive and positive’: What MLK’s legacy looks like in 6 Syracuse changemakers

Syracuse University gives out an Unsung Heroes Award every year during their annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, which this year took place on Sunday, Jan. 22. The school has given out this award since 1994 to community leaders who embody MLK’s vision for an equal nation and world.

MLK said in his 1967 speech, “The Other America,”: “...if we are to bring America to the point that we have one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, there are certain things that we must do. The job ahead must be massive and positive.”

These awardees are local people who jump in when they see an opportunity or a need. They knock on doors, they make trouble for their local legislators and school administrators. They act in kindness, generosity, even in anger and exhaustion, but always towards justice and construction. You might pass them on the streets of Syracuse. Stop to extend a hand.

Trinity Brumfield and Camille Ogden

In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, a TikTok trend making light of his killing made its way to West Genesee High School.

Trinity Brumfield and Camille Ogden watched on their phones as classmates pretended to be dead on the ground, others pretending to press a knee to the prostrate actors.

In the wash of national Black Lives Matter protests, Floyd’s murder and the ignorance they said was festering in their own high school, Brumfield and Ogden wanted to act.

“Change only happens when you force it,” said Ogden.

Brumfield jumped in: “You pave the way for yourself.”

Each was aware of the other’s capacity for activism, they said, and they snapped together like magnets.

They founded UMOJA, a student-led group named after the Swahili word for “unity,” to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their school. They co-chair a social justice group with a similar mission. They took a summer course run by the Student Coalition on Race Equity to understand implicit bias, white privilege and Black history. They sit on the Superintendent’s Advisory Council, the West Genesee DEI Council and the Restorative Council, which helps define consequences for school bias incidents. They volunteer at church. They received the state attorney general’s “Triple ‘C’ Award” last June.

Despite all the work they do with administrators, Brumfield and Ogden don’t have any higher-ups’ numbers in their phones. That’s good though, they said. They’d rather show up at office doors.

Their peers know this and come to them in search of representation. It’s heavy work.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who didn’t want it,” said Ogden.

But they keep jumping into the fray. For one of their initiatives — Justice, Equity and Diversity Inclusion (JEDI) — they invite teachers who they think have demonstrated bias to sit at lunch and talk.

Mentors initially offered to sit as mediators, but Brumfield and Ogden decided to get into without a middleman.

Sometimes those conversations left them “fuming,” they said. Sometimes the lunches provided them new clarity into other people’s points of view. Occasionally it resolved something.

They’re still dealing with some of the same discrimination as their ancestors did, which is exhausting, said Brumfield. Her grandfather was an American sharecropper; Ogden’s grandmother was a nurse living in Paris. The highschoolers have complex feelings about their grandparents’ histories: awe at their resilience and enterprise, aggravation at the discrimination they faced.

They’re trying to break the wheel for the kids who are even younger than they are, they said. They’re currently building mentorship workshops for middle schoolers.

Akua Goodrich, the high school’s director of student registration, nominated Brumfield and Ogden with a glowing essay and a Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “Somewhere we must come to see that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”

Put simply, by Ogden: “Unless we address issues, we’re basically screwed.”

Thomas Wilson

Thomas Wilson can’t get across campus without someone stopping him for a chat. Sometimes it’s his pals, or his friends and companions from Hendrick’s Chapel, or anyone who has seen his anchor spot on SU’s student TV station.

Wilson is, fittingly, the host of “Thomas on the Town,” a Citrus TV news segment that follows Wilson in a Charles Kuralt-style tour around campus, for impromptu interviews during the between-class rush, or sit-downs with campus administrators.

“I like going out and asking tough questions,” said Wilson, his disarming gaze magnified behind glasses.

Wilson is a journalism and political science double-major, and he plans pursue a career as a TV anchor.

For Citrus TV, he’s hosted and executive produced segments on the campus’ Department of Public Safety, the closing of the Starbucks on the hill and finals stress, always with a zest for face-to-face interviews.

In one video, microphone in hand, he strolled the halls of InclusiveU, the university’s support program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, in search of interviewees. Wilson participates in that program and he’s the first student from InclusiveU to receive the Unsung Heroes award.

“I’m not going to forget this,” said Wilson. “I’m just very thankful.”

His almost four years on campus put him right in the middle of Covid shutdowns and Not Again SU protests. But what his InclusiveU mentors describe as his “amazing enthusiasm” carried Wilson through stressful years, and helped him grapple with his doubts about being taken seriously on the air.

“I got over it,” he said, matter-of-factly.

Wilson’s favorite studies are of macro politics, but his knack is for people.

Aside from the legions who recognize and greet Wilson on his strolls across campus, he has a cadre of close friends who were overjoyed to hear about the award. “They (SU) got it right,” Wilson’s friends told him.

Wilson’s faith is also important to him, and he has a tight-knit community at Hendrick’s Chapel. Every week he weaves through the pews, checking the books and changing the candles when the tapers get low. On Sundays the chapel group has dinner together and chat warmly.

He’ll miss these people, and his work at Citrus TV where now he’s the wise senior to wide-eyed freshmen.

“This is how my whole career started, and everyone loves me across campus. It’s going to be very sad when I have to go,” said Wilson.

He paused, then bared his indefatigable enthusiasm.

“But, it’s going to be a very sweet moment.”

Nichole Henry

Nichole Henry has an open door, hours of her time, a kind word or a joyful anecdote for anyone who might need or want it.

That kind of thing always came easy to her, so she was surprised when she was told she would be winning this award, for something so simple as kindness.

“I am honored and humbled and in awe of how people view me,” she said. When she read her colleague’s nomination essay for her, she cried a bit.

Henry is the director of admissions and recruitment in the College of Professional Studies, a post she’s held for more than 8 years now. She’s one of the first people who prospective students meet when they consider SU, and she’s made it a priority to seek out and guide non-traditional, or post-traditional, students.

Those are people with extenuating circumstances, said Henry, like having a full-time job or a family, or they’re taking care of someone. “They don’t have time to play around,” she said. They want to know truthfully if SU will be the right place for them, and if they can swing it.

Henry prides herself on being an honest sounding board for those people, she said. If SU’s curriculum doesn’t offer the kind of flexibility they need, or it’s too expensive, she’ll say that. Then she’ll help them find a better fit or put them in contact with other people in her network at other schools, which isn’t strictly in her job description.

She does it because it’s just human to care, she said. She worked in finance early in her career but found it cutthroat. So she left, and now she matchmakes people striving for education with the best future she find for them. That feels good.

Henry’s gift is empathy, said Jimmy Luckman, Associate Director of the Office of Academic Affairs, in his nomination essay about her. She’s “an agent of change and love,” he wrote.

A lot of that is learned from her Caribbean parents, said Henry.

“I don’t know if you know anything about the West Indian household,” she said — “Everything is very direct. But right behind that direct, is the tone of love.”

This is how she tries to treat the students in her first-year seminar, she said, also how she leads as a dialogue facilitator for InterFaith Works, and as a mentor in SU’s fullCIRCLE program to assist certain students of color with academic and personal success.

“You have to read the room,” she said, “and be okay to share your authentic self.”

“My authentic self happens to be goofy, unfortunately,” she said, chuckling. “And straightforward. I’m an open book.”

In addition to her work, and being a loving mother (and honorary “Uber driver”) of two kids, Henry is working on her doctoral research and founded a chapter of Zeta Phi Beta, one of the “Divine 9″ sororities, for Onondaga County, when she observed a shortage of service to communities outside of the city.

Henry has a knack for turning her success into a communal experience, filling in her story with descriptions of all the people she loves and admires.

But it’s moving to be recognized for her leadership, said Henry.

“Sometimes people are looking for me for jokes or laughs, or … something entertaining,” she said.

“They don’t always see the very serious work that I like to do.”

Candice Ogbu

Candice Ogbu was not supposed to be on campus this semester, but returning for the MLK Day dinner gave her a good opportunity to stump the School of Education halls, since faculty have been slow to return her emails about a mentorship opportunity.

“I think I might just end up going into … the Women and Gender Studies Department and knocking on every single door,” she said, laughing.

Ogbu is in her last semester at SU and, untraditionally, is taking it abroad to Sydney, Australia. She’s doing it now because for the last three and a half years, she’s been working non-stop.

It started with the pandemic, she said, while she was cloistered in her parents’ home in Georgia. She had to stay inside to keep her immunocompromised family members safe, while a few months later BLM protests surged around the state and country.

“I kept thinking, I wish there was more I could do.”

So she applied to serve as the DEI chair for SU’s Student Association, and got it. That opened the floodgates for her service work, which includes organizing BIPOC panels and campus clean-up days as part of the student association, and then getting involved at Planned Parenthood on East Genesee Street.

She started out as an intern, scribing and assisting with small clinical work. She got her phlebotomy license, and then a job running Covid tests for the City of Syracuse, which dragged her out of bed at the crack of dawn. That wasn’t her favorite thing, but it was lovely to get to know Syracuse’s essential workers by name when everyone was relying on them to hold the city together, she said.

Ogbu helped create a mental health retreat program for Planned Parenthood, and came up with a mammoth list of local and national resources for everything from infant care to LGBTQ+ rights to subsidized internet access. She sat down with Syracuse-area residents to figure out what resources she could match them with to ease their burdens, then she helped them fill out the forms.

At the time, Ogbu was pre-med, but she gently transitioned into a psychology and neuroscience major with a disability studies minor, and is now a prestigious McNair Scholar. She lights up when she talks about the lab tests she’s running to figure out how stress influences screen time and impulsivity (“Do you know about the marshmallow test? The original one?” she asked eagerly, in a nod to a founding experiment on gratification delay from Stanford University).

She’s excited about cyberpsychology, how technology impacts us psychologically and even biologically.

But for the next few months, she’s going to slow down a bit in Sydney. She’s trying to volunteer at a refugee organization in the city, and will post a video blog about her experiences on the continent. She’s expecting some discomfort, since Australia’s population is vastly white, according to CIA World Factbook (Indigenous Australians are designated differently than those of African descent, and make up 3% of the total population).

She has intentionally thrown herself into challenging cultural spaces before. In 2022 she traveled with SU Hillel to Israel to learn about the Israel-Palestine conflict and Judaism, a faith she does not follow.

Before she heads to Sydney, Ogbu needs to settle up a student organization she’s helping found, called “PP Generation,” to set up a solid link between the campus and Planned Parenthood. She still needs a faculty mentor to sign on, but she’s determined.

“I just want some type of voice or place where I could actually help,” she said.

Oceanna Fair

“Our families need relief,” Oceanna Fair wrote in a letter to the editor to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard in August, 2022.

Fair has been advocating for effective lead removal from Syracuse neighborhoods for years. Her brother was permanently impacted by childhood lead poisoning, and four decades later, Fair’s granddaughter also suffered lead poisoning.

“Why wasn’t this taken care of? Why are we still dealing with it in such high amounts in the city and on this side of town?” Fair told SU’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in May, 2021.

Fair has been the Southside branch leader of Families for Lead Freedom Now, a grassroots organization, since 2019. She has advocated lead poisoning prevention for Black and Brown children particularly, who are disproportionately affected by poverty and lead exposure.

In the past few years, she has pored over local lead laws and policies to advocate their passage to local legislators, and traveled across state lines to share her family’s story at national forums, according to Qiana Williams, Central New York Community Foundation Community Investment program officer, who nominated Fair for the Unsung Heroes award.

Fair is a “change-agent,” wrote Williams, and was instrumental in getting the City of Syracuse’s Lead Ordinance passed in 2020.

“Nobody is listening to these families that are going through these issues,” Fair said in 2021.

“The community must be heard on this issue,” she wrote.

Fair could not be reached for comment by print time.

Jules Struck writes about life and culture in and around Syracuse. Contact her anytime at jstruck@syracuse.com or on Instagram at julesstruck.journo.