Victor Sanchez recalled how ashamed he was of being Mexican in middle school.

“I would go around school hearing people talk so negative about being Mexican that … being Mexican was shameful,” the Latino Student Union Chief of Staff told the community in the gymnasium of Thomas Jefferson High School on Monday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. “People would ask me, ‘what’s your ethnicity?’ and I would say any other race but that. I went around school pretending to be anyone but myself.”

Attending Thomas Jefferson High School was different though, he said. The school is a place where diversity is praised and accepted.

After finding the Latino Student Union club, he was able to celebrate his culture, no longer ashamed.

“I was proud to state that I was Latino,” he said. “Without Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn’t have been able to live as I do today.”

Organized by students at Thomas Jefferson High School and the city of Federal Way’s Diversity Commission, the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day community festival concluded a weekend-long food drive that raised approximately $4,000.

But guest speaker Erin Jones urged Federal Wayans to look beyond King’s one day of remembrance.

“Martin stood up for poverty, Martin stood up for homelessness, he stood up for racial equity,” Jones said to the crowd. “Are you willing to be Martin? Because we can do Martin Luther King Day but if we don’t take Martin Luther King’s spirit with us tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, then we’re just checking a box.”

Jones said everyone has the power to do something, to be a “Martin Luther King” wherever they are “not just today, but every day.”

A former Federal Way Public Schools’ Director of Equity and Achievement, Jones moved on to be the Director of AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) in the Tacoma School District in 2014. She is currently running for State Superintendent. Monday’s Martin Luther King, Jr. event was the third she’s spoken at in Federal Way.

Jones challenged young people to invest time in helping the world around them now instead of waiting until they’re older.

Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., she said, “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid… You refuse to do it because you want to live longer… You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house, so you refuse to take the stand.

“Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”

Although Jones described herself as a shy kid, “not a public speaker at all,” she distinctly remembers giving her first Martin Luther King, Jr. speech at the age of 14.

In 1986, she was the only African-American student at her school in the Netherlands where she was reared.

“It’s kind of how I heard about Martin Luther King, I didn’t even know who he was,” she said, adding that the school system doesn’t formally teach the civil rights movement in middle school. “I had to learn a bunch of things about him to give a speech.”

She was blown away.

Although Martin Luther King, Jr. was no doubt a huge inspiration to Jones, she said she knew she wanted her life to matter at the age of 9 when a former Egyptian president’s wife did a peace tour at her school.

Jones returned to the United States in 1989 with a picture in her mind that racism was gone because of the civil rights movement – a “really naive” thought, she said.

“I realized my college town was rich and white and where I played basketball was poor and black,” she said. “And almost, I think we’ve gone backwards a bit. When I think of the rhetoric of political campaigns … I’ve heard some ugliness.”

“Voter registration, affirmative action, police brutality,” Jones lists.

She wonders if it’s backwards or if people just feel more free to say what they’ve been thinking all along.

Her goals going forward as she runs for Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction are not only for zip codes, race and language to not be the greatest predictor of how students are going to do in school, but to leverage her status as the first black woman running for that executive office position “to help kids and adults see that you can do anything. Your skin color doesn’t have to stop you from doing anything.”

After her speech at Thomas Jefferson High School, Jones said the first person to thank her for speaking was a little white boy.

“He said, ‘I just told my dad that I think you need to be the next president,’” she said. “It’s not just about little brown children, I want all children to see that anyone can be anything.”

Superintendent Tammy Campbell spoke of the progress that’s been made in the last 50 years in Martin Luther King’s vision and goals, but acknowledged there’s still much more work to do.

“This work will require each of us to lead with compassion, courage and conviction,” she said. “Conviction that each one of us has the right to experience the whole measure of success and opportunity.”

Campbell said that no matter the school or child, students should be challenged and supported to achieve their highest potential.

“This means when you look at our achievement data, you don’t see achievement gaps across racial, language and economic lines,” she said. ” … So when I walk into Panther Lake, no matter the student, I act like that could be the next President Obama, the next President Reagan, the next President Clinton. I engage with that student as if they could be the next mayor of Federal Way, they could be the next superintendent, the next doctor, dentist, judge and so on.”

Campbell said no matter the student’s background, which includes gender, economic status, race, sexual orientation or ethnicity, “we must convey the highest expectations” to they’re able to achieve their dreams.

“We have to get race right but there are other dimensions and isms that we have to pay attention to live up to the full measure of what Dr. King’s describing,” Campbell said. “To achieve this outcome, the school district, city government and the larger community must collaborate and partner in a manner that we have not seen before.”

Thomas Jefferson High School Principal Adrienne Chacon, Diversity Commission Chair Gregory Baruso, poem readers Julia Walker, Jerrod Obiya and Darisu Presley, and Mayor Jim Ferrell also spoke at the fifth annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration with performances from the Raider Association of Indian Students Performance, a student video titled, “I have a dream…” and student Cathy Tran wining the art contest.

Photos by Bruce Honda and Raechel Dawson