"It's good to be in the South, because when you say, 'Good morning!' the audience responds," joked scholar and activist Angela Davis during her lecture Friday commemorating the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death.

In her address, titled "We are Not Now Living the Dream," Davis shared views on King and what she felt was the belittlement of him and the entire movement.

"The dream speech has overshadowed all the other deep analysis speeches King gave," Davis said. "King spoke out against the Vietnam War and linked global struggles and economic conditions to our American movement. It was beyond civil rights. It was more than America."

Davis was one of several who spoke during Vanderbilt's two-day remembrance of King's death in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Other speakers during the "We Speak for Ourselves" seminar included the Rev. James Lawson, English professor Houston Baker, University of Nottingham professor Richard King and Ruth Turner Perot, who interviewed Robert Penn Warren. Warren's book "Who Speaks for the Negro?" was the basis of several discussions.

Davis, professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, said she also believed the civil rights movement had been reduced to "the dream of one man," noting there were many other leaders and activists during King's time.

"Without Fanny Lou Hamer, Barack Obama is inconceivable," Davis said, "and I rarely hear that discourse when I hear talks of this being an 'unprecedented election.'"

Davis said she felt if King was alive today, he would be disappointed in the scholar-activist community.

"If he were around today, he would criticize our hyper-individualism and be against the absolute rule of the market, which extenuates itself in all aspects of our lives," Davis said.

Davis shared these views in front of a crowd that was so large, additional chairs had to be brought into the room. Even then, the audience spilled into an overflow room.

"I liked the event", said freshman Danielle Whittaker, who did some research on Davis and decided to come to the event to see what she had to say, "but I couldn't hear her too well because of the overflow room I was in. However, the points that I did catch were really good points."

Engineering school junior Kyle McMillan came to the event because of Davis' "radical" reputation.

"It's not everyday you get to see someone who was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list," McMillan said.

Although there had been some discourse over how appropriate Davis was to commemorate King, McMillan found Davis to be "appropriate without being overly one-sided or caustic."

"It was a very open point of view," McMillan said. "She treated the subject matter with dignity and truth and spoke candidly."

Whittaker also felt that Davis was a fitting speaker.

"She talked about freedom and how we've failed to reach King's dream," Whittaker said.

Davis, who spoke out against the tolerance for the racist rants from Don Imus and Michael Richardson and what she deemed obvious racist incidents involving Tiger Woods and the Jena 6, urged the audience to realize that racism exists institutionally and causes these seemingly individual racist acts.

"We urgently need more captious meetings about racism and anti-racism," Davis said. "We have to give up the black-white paradigm."

-Danielle Gantt can be reached at danielle.a.gantt@vanderbilt.edu