As hundreds of NYU community members and New York City residents filed into Kimmel’s Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, they each received a lapel pin reading, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” This phrase would define NYU’s marquee event for MLK Week.
On Thursday evening, “Boundless” headlined NYU’s 21st MLK Week, which aims to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and was themed around the message of “Futures Unbound” this year. Focused on exploring how we can drive transformative change amid political repression and violence, the event featured three distinguished panelists — Michael Ealy, actor and activist, Yusef Salaam, New York City councilmember and criminal legal advocate and Min Jin Lee, author of award-winning novels “Pachinko” and “Free Food for Millionaires.”
A mixture of high-energy optimism and sobering reality, the night began by awarding seven 2026 MLK Awards for NYU administrators, faculty members and students who have embodied MLK’s ethos of social justice and community-building. Among those awarded included Steinhardt professor Natalia Ortiz, who received a Faculty Award whose pedagogy is based in anti-racist and social justice based educational principles. Along with her work as a professor, Ortiz is also active in tangible advocacy work as the Director of Programs at the Center for Racial Justice in Education.
CAS senior Saylee Nemade won a Changemaker Award, awarded to one undergraduate and one graduate student who serve as advocates for community improvement. Nemade was awarded for her work in establishing the All NYU Food Pantry Committee to strengthen university collaboration against food insecurity as a United Nations Millennium Fellow.
The last award presented was the Humanitarian Award for Derrick Bell, who worked as a civil rights lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and taught at the NYU School of Law from 1991 until his death in 2011. On stage, Janet Dewart Bell recalled her husband’s legacy, calling him a “patriot” who “did not give into cynicism and despair” and worked toward “combating the whitewashing of American history.”
During the event’s musical interval, NYU BLIVE, the student organization for Black, Brown and Hispanic students within the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of the Arts, played a medley of songs celebrating Black History Month. They began with a rendition of the classic hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” followed by Beyoncé’s “Freedom” and Bob Marley’s “One Love” — and ended with a proud raised-fist salute. Throughout the night, the mood of the crowd was warm and convivial, and standing ovations consistently punctuated the event.
The panel, moderated by Wagner professor Judy Pryor-Ramirez, began with Salaam. He traced his personal journey, beginning when he had been falsely imprisoned at 15 as one of the “Central Park Five,” the well-known case in which five Black and Latino teenagers had been wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting a white woman in Central Park, and which president Donald Trump had been an outspoken proponent for the death sentence in. He then followed with his election as city councilman for Harlem in 2023, emphasizing the necessity of exercising your voice for people who believed themselves “born in error.”
“Sometimes people ask me why I do not feel rage at those who misrepresented me,” Salaam said during his discussion. “I said that ‘if I felt that way I would just be hurting myself; it would be like drinking poison to hope my enemies were hurt.’”
Lee’s novels work to reflect the myriad of experiences that define the Korean diaspora and is set to release her new book “American Hagwon” this fall. Her discussion was grounded in her path to becoming a novelist and finding the power to understand her identity and the politics that shape it through storytelling, recounting the bullying she had initially faced as an immigrant growing up in Queens.
Actor and activist Ealy echoed Lee’s ideas and applied it to his experience in acting and how it has evolved over time with his involvement in social justice. Set to star as Malcom X in Prime Video’s upcoming limited series, Ealy describes how early in his career, the parameters that defined his artistic practice were limiting.
“I feel like a total failure,” Ealy said during the panel. “What changed for me was at a certain point I found that I was measuring with a measuring stick that was not made for me.”
What was understood is that, as a community, we must meet the political moment rather than let it force us into apathy and assimilation.
“We can either see the trees or take a 50-foot view and see the forest,” Salaam said. “The desire has to be if you know that you were born with people, you can look at what is making you fear. Fear is false evidence appearing real. Don’t shrink. Turn your light up. Let people know who you are, why you are.”
Contact Justin Liu at [email protected].