Quinn for Illinois

By Jessica Allen

CHICAGO—“Out of many are one.”

This is the phrase, quoted in Latin, Gov. Pat Quinn used to describe the essence of democracy supported by Martin Luther King Jr. The Northwestern alum (Law ’80) spent Monday at his alma mater with an audience of about 200 people from both NU and the Chicago community.

“If we’re going to improve our democracy, make it better, we have to follow (King’s) prescription,” Quinn said.

The event was planned by the Day to Recognize the Efforts and Achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Committee, composed of people from the School of Law and Feinberg School of Medicine. As people around the country celebrated King, NU’s event, held in Thorne Auditorium on the Chicago campus, recognized not only his legacy but the elements of his vision that apply to today’s issues.

“I know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be right here saying, ‘You go for it, lady,’” Carmen Velásquez said of her efforts to improve the lives of undocumented immigrants. Velásquez, executive director of Alivio Medical Center, was presented with an award for her work trying to bring health care to under-served communities. Alivio, a nonprofit, has six locations in poor minority neighborhoods around Chicago.

The theme of the day was drawn from a quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” However, a clear second was a line by King himself:

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane,” which the keynote speaker, Harriet Washington, quoted in her address.  Washington, the author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,” said health care continues to be an unaddressed human right and medical red-lining continues.

“But today we can change this,” she said. “We have it in our power, without regard for race, without regard for economic status, without regard for national origin.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and University President Morton O. Schapiro also addressed the crowd.

Schapiro said his inspiration from the day was to rededicate himself to creating the kind of inclusive community King envisioned.

The day was sprinkled with memories of King and the civil rights era of the 1960s. Dr. Quentin Young, one of several panelists on social justice in health care, discussed his experience working as King’s personal physician in Chicago.

“The bad news is he didn’t get sick much,” Young said, as the audience laughed.
Jennifer Yoo said Young’s presence is one of the reasons she came out to the Chicago campus. The Weinberg senior said she admires him because he’s a proponent of the single-payer health care system. Yoo had also read some of Washington’s work.

“Because I want to be a physician, I wanted to hear what they say about the future, how to bring medicine to the poor, to the marginalized,” she said. “Martin Luther King is the perfect day to talk about that. It was worth more of my time than I could have spent in Evanston studying.”