Celebrating the Legacy of Dr. King through Community Empowerment

Collette Caprara / January 18, 2011

Shortly after the establishment of a federal holiday honoring the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1986, Kimi Gray was among the first to urge that he be honored by celebrating a “day on” rather than a day off. She felt that a day aptly commemorating Dr. King’s legacy would be one in which all the engines of community investment and service are moving with full force.

At that time, Kimi was a young single mother with five children living in D.C.’s Kenilworth-Parkside public housing projects. She took Dr. King’s dream to heart, because she herself was a dreamer. Like Dr. King, her vision of liberation encompassed not only establishing equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, but also of developing a strategy to overcome roadblocks to upward mobility and individuals’ fulfillment of their God-given capacities and potential.

In the late 1980s, Kimi was in the vanguard of a band of intrepid community leaders in public housing developments throughout the nation who committed themselves to revitalizing conditions in their neighborhoods and creating avenues for the next generation to pursue their dreams. With the support of Bob Woodson and his National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and then-HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, who shared their vision, the Resident Management Movement blazed a trail for community empowerment. (more…)