Speakers who gathered to commemorate the late American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr called on the community to speak up for the right thing, even at personal risk.

Alexa Lightbourne, the Minister of Home Affairs, shared a message with young attendees today for the Martin Luther King Jr Day commemoration at St Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Hamilton, — highlighting the importance of standing up to protect future generations.

Ms Lightbourne said: “It is important for us to organise, to speak up and to demand better.”

Speaking of the high cost of living in Bermuda, she added: “You may see yourself struggling where other groups are doing just fine.

“Dr King would ask Bermuda, who is organising for the workers, who is demanding that fairness happens and keeping the legacy of our people alive?”

She added: “Speaking up is not always safe — but it is always necessary.”

Student groups attending included Whitney Institute Middle School, Victor Scott Primary School and the Bermuda Institute, which delivered a musical interlude.

They were joined by Kim Wilkerson, the Attorney-General.

Dr King was a Baptist minister and activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s to his assassination in 1968.

The commemoration came with references to Bermuda’s own civil rights campaigns.

Two of the surviving members of the Progressive Group, which paved the way for desegregation in Bermuda, joined the event organised in part by activist Glenn Fubler.

Izola Harvey, a member of the secret civil rights group that worked to organise the 1959 theatre boycott for which Black residents refused to attend cinemas, restaurants and hotels in protest at racial segregation, took to the podium to share a message.

Ms Harvey, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday, recalled how her role in the boycott, while five months pregnant, included printing and distributing posters highlighting the message of the movement.

She said: “I decided to ask two people who were boarding with us at the time if they would mind purchasing a [printer] machine for us so that we could get out the number of posters we needed.

“I knew that they had been made aware of what was happening in Bermuda and they didn’t seem surprised at my request.”

She recalled that once they agreed, “we were in business”.

Ms Harvey took pains to point out that the poster distributed came with the message “please, please no violence”.

Florenz Maxwell, another original member of the Progressive Group whose book Girlcott reflected the times, told of her pride at being a member of a movement bound for a common cause and advocating that their boycott remain peaceful.

Ms Maxwell said: “Let’s push the nonviolence, because we are having a lot of violence today.

“Find out what is traumatising people who want to be violent. We all have trauma, we could all have become violent. In my day we used a fist; today, we use a gun.

“Let’s look at the people who feel traumatised today, try to get to know them and understand them.

“When you think about the Progressive Group, don’t just think about desegregation. Think about the nonviolence.”

Ms Maxwell spoke of Dr King’s tragic assassination and explained why the Progressive Group had to remain a secret organisation.

“That was deliberate, not because we wanted to be cowards, but because we knew that if people knew who we were, they would not have listened,” she said.

Reverend Nicholas Tweed of St Paul AME shared some comments by Dr King to help demonstrate what he stood for, including the belief that capitalism in America had outlived its usefulness, bringing about “a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes”.

The event saluted the late Edwin Skinner who, in the mid-1940s, operated a school in Bermuda for teenagers of all races despite it being a time of segregation.