BANGOR, Maine — “Martin Luther King had a dream and we’re working to make it a reality,” Izundu Ngwu, an international student at the University of Maine from Nigeria, told a group of about 50 people Sunday night at the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine.
Ngwu, who is treasurer of the International Student Association, was one of four members of a panel who discussed being young and black today before a mostly white, middle-age audience.
The event was the center’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Day to be marked Monday in Maine and the nation
Other panelists were: Ronald Robbs of East Orange, New Jersey, who is an elementary education major and president of the Black Student Union at the university; Ogechi Ogoke, a chemical engineering major and president of the UMaine chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers; and Muna Abdullahi, who grew up in Portland and is the director of Multicultural Student Life on campus.
All talked about their experiences on and off campus. Each emphasized the need to achieve fully King’s dream that people be judged not by the color of their skin, but by “the content of their character.”
Robbs talked of growing up poor in a community where the drug selling activities of a relative put food on the table and clothes on his back. A coach from a Pop Warner football team helped him see there could be a different way of life for him, Robbs said.
“The only reason originally that I wanted to come to the university was to play sports,” he said. “That changed as I started reading and learning.”
Robbs said that now when he returns to the neighborhood in which he grew up, he is looked down on because of his “preppy clothes” and the rock music he listens to.
Ngwu grew up half a world away from Robbs in Nigeria.
“I grew up fairly privileged,” Ngwu said. “My parents could afford to send me to private school, but it was a very insulated background.”
When he returns to Nigeria with a degree from an American university, he told the group, he will not lack for job opportunities.
“It is harder for a black man to make it in America than in Nigeria,” he said.
Abdullahi, who earned her undergraduate degree at UMaine, said that like the society at large, the university system needs more diversity, especially among its faculty, if it wants to implement Martin Luther King’s dream.
“I was the only person of color in the Department of Sociology for four years,” she said. “I didn’t have a single professor who looked like me. I didn’t have a single professor who’d had the experiences I had. There were times when I was ready to transfer and move to a more colorful place.”
Ogoke was born in New York City to parents who immigrated from Nigeria. After the event, he said his family moved around a lot, including stints in Texas and California.
“Maine may be one of the whitest places I’ve ever lived, but it also may be one of the most open and accepting places,” he said. “You are able to grow here as an individual.”
Ogoke, who wants to recruit more minority students to the sciences, said he hoped to organize a similar panel on campus in the fall so students of color could talk about their experiences and show incoming students that they came from different backgrounds.