Courtesy of Lewis & Clark
On Jan. 27, Lewis & Clark hosted a panel titled “United We Stand: Acts of Civil Disobedience in Solidarity,” as a part of programming for Martin Luther King Jr. Week. The wide-ranging panel discussion emphasized solidarity, collective responsibility and the often-overlooked radical dimensions of King’s legacy, bringing together faculty, community organizers and students.
The panel featured Reiko Hillyer, author and professor of history, Teressa Raiford, prominent local activist and founder of the group Don’t Shoot PDX, and Christiana San Diego ’27, student leader and activist. Together, they explored how King’s legacy is often simplified in public memory, particularly when it comes to his critiques of capitalism, militarism and state violence.
The gathering was opened with Director of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement Joann Zhang, reading a land acknowledgement that framed the evening within a broader historical and ethical context.
“So much of this country’s history is untold and not taught. From the dark history to the joy and celebration, I may hope to change that from learning together, asking hard questions and getting uncomfortable in order to get back full. And, of course, to celebrate our ancestral people,” Zhang said.
Event organizers described the panel as an effort to move beyond just commemoration and more towards meaningful engagement with King’s work. The evening was structured to include a moderated panel discussion followed by small-group discussions over dinner, encouraging sustained dialogue among attendees.
IME Special Events & Programs Coordinator Liana Vargas ’26 began the panel with a statement of its intention.
“The purpose of this gathering is to honor Dr. King’s legacy by centering our conversation on solidarity, exploring how collective action, dialogue and encouragement can propel our communities towards equity and justice. This panel is a reminder that solidarity is a collective responsibility, one that each of us carries. We are here to transform reflection into action, to understand our moral responsibility, to challenge unjust systems through peaceful means and to apply the lessons of history to our modern society,” Vargas said.
Hillyer built off Vargas’ sentiment, noting that the majority of Americans disapproved of Dr. King during the height of his work. She continued that King’s work has been sanitized across the aisle.
“The domestication and neutralization and pastoralization of King is a deliberate movement by the right to defang what were actually very radical politics,” Hillyer said. “By 1968, 75% of Americans disapproved of King and his strategies. Why? And why has that been erased? By the late ’60s, it became clear to King that he needed to move from what he called the easy phase of the civil rights movement into the harder phase, which is to say to attack poverty, imperialism and capitalism … King’s work has been cropped.”
Hillyer emphasized that remembering King solely as a unifying or nonthreatening figure erases the political urgency of his message and limits its relevance today.
“If we contain King to the South, we contain the problem of racism to the South,” Hillyer said.
The conversation then turned toward sustainable solidarity and the importance of mutual aid and connection.
Raiford is a native to Portland and has over a decade of organizing experience, playing a role in the Black Lives Matter movement within the city. Raiford’s grandparents were targeted in a racist incidentin 1981, when Portland police officers reportedly placed dead opossums on the doorstep of their restaurant. Later, in 2010, Raiford’s nephew was shot and killed downtown in a case that remains unsolved. The case inspired Raiford to found Don’t Shoot PDX, a prominent activist group formed to scrutinize actions of the Portland Police Bureau.
Drawing on her experience, Raiford highlighted how education, art and community-based resource sharing can create long-term change beyond protests alone.
“Sustainable solidarity looks like building mutual aid, communities, doing the work of bystander interventions, by informing and educating and learning biases, (learning) the causes behind it. A lot of our work as community organizers in Portland — which is one of the whitest cities in America — fighting racism is pretty hard. So, we had to use education as a vehicle into spaces that could help us aggregate resources and inform people about the disenfranchisement of their political access and privilege,” Raiford said.
San Diego offered a perspective grounded in youth organizing and campus life, emphasizing that solidarity begins with community-building and everyday acts of resistance.
“What we start with for low barrier action is to build a community, because when you build a community, you can build a movement. So I encourage everyone to join a group and learn how to fall in love with your community, because isolation is actually how fascism wins,” San Diego said. “I challenge you to become intentionally disruptive in small ways every single day. And this is something that I still feel very new to and that I’m trying to challenge myself to do every day because we have to change the norm.”
San Diego also spoke candidly about the possibility of burnout, naming joy and care as essential components of resistance.
“Authoritarianism uses burnout to silence us. You know, in those moments, I have to remind myself that I’m allowed to feel joy, and that joy is also an active resistance, and finding joy in your community and your life is an act of resistance,” San Diego said.
As the panel closed, speakers reflected on hope and what sustains them amid ongoing injustice. Raiford underscored the urgency of recognizing state-sanctioned violence as a daily reality for many communities across the nation.
“It’s targeted violence, state-sanctioned violence that’s happening to us. We talk about what’s happening now, like I said, Trump pushed the lever that didn’t exist before, that he unearthed it. It’s always existed this way. When you look at the audits of the numbers of people that aren’t housed, the disabled community or Black and Brown communities, aging citizens, children that are coming out across the care, people being reunited in their communities, it’s just so malicious and insidious,” Raiford said.
Hope, the panelists suggested, lies in collective imagination, education and the growing willingness of people to confront uncomfortable truths.
“I feel like there’s a lot more people getting involved. And it makes me feel like it’s possible and that we can win this fight. My students give me hope. All of you young people, you can still think critically. You can still imagine something beyond what you’re being fed,” Hillyer said.
The event concluded with an invitation for attendees to continue these conversations over a catered dinner, reinforcing the panel’s central message of collective solidarity, learning and action.
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