By Sean Sullivan

Natick residents gathered on Monday, Jan. 19 to celebrate the birthday and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

The national holiday falls on the third Monday of the month, to roughly coincide with King’s Jan. 15 birthday. The civil rights hero was born in 1929.

Snow had filled Natick yards, fields and streets the morning and night before that Monday, but roads and lots had been cleared in time for the 10 a.m. event. The celebration was held in Natick High School’s auditorium, where attendees filled about half of its 800 seats.

The event was kicked off and interspersed with performances by local student jazz musicians, who set a tone for a gathering that was by turns celebratory and somber.

Natick High School’s West Street Jazz Combo played “Stompin’ at Savoy,” and the Walnut Hill School for the Arts brought their jazz ensemble to perform “We Shall Overcome,” and “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.”

Later, trombonist Amara St. Cyere accompanied by Joshua Lynch on piano, performed “After a Dream.”

Throughout all, the clarity of brass instruments filled the hall.

“We’re reminded that his words were never meant to stay on the page,” said Jackie Mendonsa from the podium. She serves as director of human resources for Natick public schools and introduced readings of original poetry composed by Natick middle school students.

“Steps to Justice” was written and read by Wilson Middle School’s Mary Gianni. Hili Barkaee and Illia Morozli, both of Kennedy Middle School, read theirs as well. They presented “Begins With a Dream” and “They Tell Me” respectively.

An ensemble of Natick students also performed a reading of “The ABCs of Black History,” an illustrated poetry book authored by Rio Cortez and drawn by artist Lauren Semmer.

The event’s keynote speaker was Audi Lynch, who is director of the long-running METCO program for Natick Public Schools. Begun in the late 1960s, the program brings Boston-area students to study in the Natick school system. Lynch also serves as a pastor in Boston.

“We’re here to respond to the dream that Martin Luther King Jr. had,” said Lynch. “We’re not here this morning to sanitize his dream.”

Lynch quoted King: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Lynch hinted at the United States’ current annual defense spending, which neared a trillion dollars last year, as evidence of King’s prophetic vision.

“I wonder what he would say today, if he were alive,” Lynch said. “It was the prognosis of a country that, for all its gifts and advantages, had made itself unhealthy by not living well. He saw us as a nation suffering the symptoms of a long march of investment in military misadventures that continue even to this day. It’s a country, as King saw it, that was at the same time walking away from social compacts and programs that formed the New Deal ethos.’’

King championed the rights of people of color, but his was also a colorblind critique of a culture that neglected to care for the needs and wellbeing of all its citizens. It’s an economic populism that’s often excised out of King’s legacy, she said.

“Lifting the burdens of the least of us,” said Lynch on that Monday last month. “Let us build something that looks like love.”

Sounding much the pastor from the pulpit before his ecumenical audience, Lynch exhorted that we must learn from the lessons of Reverend King, learn from history. That we must not continue to be, as Gore Vidal termed it, the “United States of Amnesia.”

To this end, Lynch said we must be answerable to and responsible for, one another. And he seemed to imply as well, liable to the rule of law.

“We have to be the United States of Accountability,” said Lynch.

The “moral arc” of history bends toward justice, Dr. King famously declared. But Lynch cautioned that that wasn’t a property of physics, but rather a claim about people.

“Only if we’re the ones doing the bending,” Lynch noted.

Martin Luther King Jr. is memorialized in a statue in Boston. Photo by Sean Sullivan