photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Darren Canady, a playwright and KU English professor, was a keynote speaker at the 18th annual MLK celebration on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Even an activist as legendary as Martin Luther King Jr. needed someone to help him up sometimes, and that was never more true than when King was stabbed in the chest with a letter opener at a 1958 book signing in Harlem.

The attack, carried out by a woman struggling with mental illness, left King “a sneeze away from death,” as he put it. And in the hospital, fellow activist Howard Thurman had an important message for King — one that Lawrence playwright and professor Darren Canady says all activists would do well to remember.

“In that moment, Howard Thurman sat with Dr. King and said, ‘You must find rest,'” Canady told the audience at Lawrence’s annual MLK Day community breakfast on Monday. “‘You are doing too much.'”

Canady has spent lots of time putting himself in the shoes of those two men in that hospital room. He and media scholar Michael Epstein worked together on a podcast, called “Day of Days,” that imagines what the men might have discussed and how it changed the course of King’s activism. While the production’s website says it is a work of historical fiction and “a dramatic interpretation of a conversation we have no transcript of,” Canady said it was clear that both King and Thurman were deeply affected by it — and he himself has been, too.

At Monday’s breakfast, hosted by the Jayhawk Breakfast Rotary Club and the Lawrence Ecumenical Fellowship, Canady said that when Epstein approached him about writing for the project, what got him hooked was its focus on Thurman. Thurman was a Baptist minister who co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco – an interracial congregation designed to break through the barriers that separated people on the basis of race, color, creed or national origin. The podcast’s website describes him not just as a church leader, but as a “Black mystic.”

“The point that Michael Epstein was trying to make to me was that this was a legacy that needed to be captured,” Canady said.

The script of the podcast, according to its website, touches on that experimental San Francisco church, but also “ranges from India to the segregated Deep South.” For Canady, the research and writing was an introspective experience. He found King and Thurman had mentioned several times later in their lives about how much that conversation had changed them.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Attendees gather for the 18th annual Martin Luther King Jr. community breakfast on Monday, January 20, 2025.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Bishop Seabury senior Eni Wintoki was the recipient of the MLK Scholarship from the Jayhawk Breakfast Rotary Club on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Monday’s breakfast featured celebratory tributes to activism and King’s legacy, including musical performances and the Rotary Club’s presentation of its $1,500 MLK Scholarship to a local high school senior, Bishop Seabury’s Eni Wintoki, who told the attendees that doing community service at her school had had a “massive impact” on her life.

Canady urged the audience not to forget that activism was about doing hard work, and even about working on yourself. What Thurman wanted King to do, Canady said, was to work on himself and “find a transcendent relationship with the divine.”

“(Thurman) says you have to rest, repair and fix the things that within you are a problem (within you) before you can work on what is out there,” Canady said.

Another lesson that Canady learned from King and Thurman was that defining someone’s life by their actions and score sheets of conflict does not get you to a place of wholeness. “It could even harm the pursuit of the very project that you’re seeking to accomplish,” Canady said.

Just as those activists then had to look inside themselves, fix themselves and pull each other up, Canady said, activists today also have to discover who they are and who they need to become.

“We have to go into our dark room and confront the things within us that affect our spirits,” Canady said. “We have to find a place to sit with those things, then take up our action and activism with a renewed purpose.

“This honors Martin. This honors Howard. This honors a worldwide pursuit of justice and universal love that is the pursuit of us all.”