This story was republished from The 19th News as part of a content-sharing agreement.

Detroit was the first place Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an early version of what would become his “I Have a Dream” speech. He recited it on June 23, 1963, at the end of Detroit’s Walk to Freedom, a march that happened weeks before he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

This piece of Detroit-first history sharpens what Martin Luther King Jr. Day asks of the city. It’s harder to treat the holiday, celebrated on Monday, as a slogan when the dream was first spoken aloud in Detroit. It’s also harder to see it as a day off when a lot of people choose to mark it every year as a day on.

The Lambda Pi Omega (LPO) chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., is one of the Detroit institutions built around that belief.

Their members measure the weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. Day in labor. They assemble toiletry kits for Detroiters without stable housing, volunteer their time to youth programs focused on combating hunger and fostering leadership skills, and step into the gaps families are already navigating, like hunger and lack of resources. Crystal Sewell, the chapter’s president, said the work is rooted in service that isn’t just a once-a-year thing.

“Our work really is about uplifting our community; that is really at the heart of what we do,” Sewell said. “It is sisterhood and service for the betterment of our local community, that’s really the essence and the spirit of our chapter.”

This year, LPO will spend Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Third New Hope Baptist Church on Detroit’s west side for its annual “We Are One” AKA Day of Service. Sorority members plan to assemble 1,908 toiletry bags for Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, a local nonprofit that provides emergency shelter and support services, including housing programs for families and people working toward recovery. The specificity in the number of kits is intentional: 1,908 reflects AKA’s founding year, 1908. After the event, the bags will be delivered to the rescue mission’s family shelter and recovery housing sites.

The chapter’s service calendar stays full throughout the year, Sewell said.

“If I were to add it up, I would say we participate in at least 10 volunteer opportunities per month,” she said. “So, you’re talking 100 to 150 volunteer service opportunities per year. There are several hours that go into our volunteerism, over 2,000 hours per year.”

LPO is part of the Divine Nine — nine historically Black fraternities and sororities under the National Pan-Hellenic Council, founded when Black students, excluded from White Greek systems, created their own organizations around scholarship, leadership and service.

King was part of that tradition. 

He was initiated into Boston’s Sigma chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha in June 1952. Alpha Phi Alpha (APA) was founded in 1906 as the first Black Greek-letter fraternity; AKA is the first Black Greek-letter sorority. 

AKA’s purpose statement includes a directive members repeat as a standard: to be of “service to all mankind.”

Jacqueline Newman has spent decades living by that. She became an AKA member in 1970 at Wayne State University. When the sorority’s LPO chapter was chartered in Detroit in 1977, she became a founding charter member. She now serves as the chapter historian.

“What we do is we try to help, whenever we can, wherever we can,” Newman said. “We love children, so we are in different schools to help feed students. We’ve clothed students. We’ve given Thanksgiving baskets. We’ve given scholarships, and it was not only to women or girls. It has been to men also. And no matter your race. That’s what I look at as service to all mankind, to all people that are in need. That’s what we do.”

Newman’s own timeline begins in the South. She was 13 and living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when King spoke in Detroit in 1963.

“I was part of the South that he was trying to free from civil rights injustices,” she said.

She moved to Detroit in 1965 with her family. “My mom and my dad were teachers and the employment was better here in Detroit,” Newman said. Her mother became a member of AKA in 1962; Newman described her own membership as legacy. “So, it was mainly a legacy for me. I followed in my mom’s footsteps.”

Her history of service began before she joined AKA. In the South, she said, “I saw so many injustices done, especially to our people. I was marching and doing civil rights things when I was 11, 12, 13 years old before I came here to Michigan.”

Those experiences compelled her to action — “you don’t want anybody else to have to go through what you went through,” Newman said.

“When you have seen a man hung on a tree, it hits you a little more,” Newman said. “If you have lived through it, it’s different.”

Detroit remembers King’s dream speech because it heard it early. Lambda Pi Omega is betting its Martin Luther King Jr. Day on a simpler goal: what gets done, who gets served, and whether the work continues when the holiday ends.

As Sewell said, service is about direct support and long-term civic work.

“Service for me is about uplifting others within our community who are of greatest need,” she said. “It is advocating for social justice, making sure our community is informed and educated and registered to vote and getting out to vote, thinking about the whole of the individual, from cradle to senior.”