Lexington’s Select Board (known at the time as the Board of Selectmen) first proclaimed Jan. 15 as Martin Luther King Day in 1970 — 16 years before MLK Day was first celebrated as a federal holiday, in 1986. In the early 2000s, Pilgrim Church hosted a celebration with panel discussions and a local college gospel choir. Since 2015, the Town Celebrations Committee has organized a Day of Service to honor Dr. King’s vision of a “Beloved Community,” free of poverty and oppression.
This year’s activities include the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington’s celebration at Follen Church on Jan. 19, and the 12th annual Day of Service on Jan. 20, including the opportunity to donate to the Lexington Food Pantry; new toys for Birthday Wishes; books, DVDs, CDs, video games and other media to More Than Words; clothing and sleeping bags to Cradles to Crayons. An opening ceremony at Grace Chapel will feature a performance by the Special Needs Arts Program (SNAP) Chorus, a presentation by the Lexington Human Rights Committee, and a Unity Walk to Cary Memorial Hall.
New this year, the MLK Service Day Committee recognized a need among local seniors, and came up with a plan that brings together Lexingtonians from diverse backgrounds and across generations to address the problem. LexObserver interviewed members of the committee to find out what they have planned, how it all came together, and what motivated them to get involved.
Chairperson of the MLK Day Committee Sara Sheikh was born into a racially mixed family in southern California. The 42-year-old former pre-school teacher, her husband, who is Pakistani, and two children moved to Lexington in 2013. Growing up, Sara was familiar with MLK but not the concept of a Day of Service. In 2019, when her daughter Zara was at the Estabrook School, they joined a volunteer group sewing fleece shawls and blankets for people in need. The items were distributed by local organizations such as Meals on Wheels and Veterans on the Green, and supplemented by gaiters, hats, and mittens knitted by volunteers.
One of those knitters was Sophia Ho, the 89-year-old doyenne of Lexington’s volunteers. The two women became friends, Sara was drawn into the work of the MLK Service Day Committee, and as they were brainstorming for 2025, discussing the traditional activities, conversations and panels, Sophia noticed that her hearing aid had disconnected from her iPhone – a recurring annoyance.
In teaching her to fix it, committee members identified an unaddressed community in need: senior Lexingtonians coping with rapidly-changing new technology.
Born in Kaifeng, China in 1935, long-time community volunteer Sophia Ho likes to share her story with more recent immigrants. She arrived in the U.S. in the 1950s and graduated from a small Catholic college in Connecticut -– one of two Chinese students. Like many immigrants who found reading in English difficult, she took few history or literature courses and had only a vague knowledge of America’s racial history. She had been aware of “colorism” in China, noticing the premium people placed on light skin, had heard of the Ku Klux Klan and segregation in America. But it was only after she married MIT grad Dr. Larry Ho and they moved to Lexington with their children in 1966 that racism became more tangible to her.
“My children were the only Chinese in their classes,” Sophia recalls, “but I myself never felt like a foreigner,” she says. On the contrary, Sophia identified with her neighbors, many of whom were well-educated immigrants like herself. One, the late Edith Sandy, daughter of German Jewish immigrants, was running for Town Meeting and persuaded Sophia to manage her political campaign. She learned on the job, and wound up volunteering to elect Governor Michael Dukakis.
The Hos also became a host family for a son’s second-grade classmate through the METCO program, and Sophia witnessed how race affected his life. She also learned about Dr. King, who was awarded his doctorate at Boston University. “So many immigrants here still don’t know who he was or what he did,” Sophia notes. “His work inspired me to start registering Chinese people in Lexington who were American citizens to vote.”
Once her hearing aid was synched with her phone, the MLK Day of Service Committee asked Yumio Saneyoshi, owner and director of the Penguin Coding School of Lexington to help with their project for the MLK Day of Service 2025.
Born in Tokyo in 1970, Yumio was sent to a Christian boarding school in St. Louis when he was 14. “The school was 95% white,” he recalls. There were no African-American students, a few Africans, and me.” But the curriculum introduced him to the American civil rights movement and MLK. There, and later at Williams and Harvard, he was attracted to MLK’s philosophy of non-violent activism. When he and his Chinese-born wife moved to Lexington in 2016, the MLK Day Committee seemed like a good way to meet people and, when asked to help with the senior tech project, he immediately understood how it transcended race and place. “My mother in Japan can’t even use email,” Yumio said. “It’s so frustrating, we sometimes get into fights over it. So I totally understood the need.”
He thought about how best to teach the seniors, and texted 16-year-old LHS junior Zoe Wynn.
Born in 2008 to parents who trace their ancestry to Ireland and Wales, Zoe began attending the Penguin Coding School in fourth grade, led Penguin’s first team to compete in Technovation (an international competition whose organizers reach out to girls), and had worked at Penguin as a teaching assistant. Like many LPS students, she first learned about Martin Luther King at Fiske Elementary School when the teacher read the book, “Martin’s Big Words” to explain what had become a regular school vacation day. In later years she learned about King’s connection with Boston, his ideas, activism, influence, and legacy. When Yumio texted her, she found the idea of extending King’s idea of service to the senior community logical and, in turn, she texted three friends at LHS.
Margaret Urdan was born in 2007 into a family of eastern European Jews. She, Zoe, and two others had never known a world without the internet and without multi-racial movies and TV. They also had no recollection of the long and vicious history that preceded every state in the union observing Martin Luther King Day in 2000. They put together an ambitious pilot program, covering aspects of browsing, synching devices, apps, working with photos, and raising awareness of scams – especially for those many seniors who often order items online.
Margaret’s 90-year-old grandmother was the first senior she coached. Her father, a telemedicine CEO, and mother, an ER doctor, had little time for repeated questions like Where did my email go? Why does my photo look so bad? Or How do I turn off the microwave?.
“Answering her teaches me patience,” Margaret says. “My grandmother’s biggest problem is to debug things. She can’t identify or sometimes name the site of a problem, let alone understand what’s gone wrong. I’m 16. For people my age, that knowledge is really easy to take for granted. We don’t realize that it’s a learned skill and not something that comes naturally.”
Margaret herself started using an iPhone at age 8 – although her connectivity was limited. She was assigned an LPS laptop and school email address that same year, learning to type on the school laptop she returned at the end of each day. At LHS, she was assigned a personal Chromebook to use for the entire year. Teachers use Google Classroom to facilitate assignments and due dates. Margaret says she uses Snapchat and Instagram to stay connected with summer camp friends far away and sports team-mates in Lexington. “I set time limits though,” she says, “Usually 20 minutes, because it’s so easy to start scrolling and forget about your homework.”
After assembling a team and curriculum, the last piece of the project to fall into place was the venue. One of Sara Sheikh’s headaches is assuring problem-free access to MLK activities in January’s unpredictable weather; she had to think about snowstorms, parking, reliable snow-plowing and sidewalk clearing, clean facilities and state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment. What better venue than Lexington’s spanking new Police Station? She emailed Lexington Police Chief McLean, who was pleased to offer the facility.
The first pilot session of the Tech for Seniors seminar was held in November in the Lexington Police Station’s community room. Monday, Jan. 20 between 3 and 4:30 they plan to run what they hope will be the first of several free senior tech seminars. If it is well-attended, Sara would like to organize a six-week course that would run throughout the year and bring together seniors from all Lexington’s diverse communities.
This tech-challenged senior plans to be there, and at the ABCL celebration the day before.