Randolph-Macon College celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Jan. 21, 2025 in Blackwell Auditorium inside the Center for the Performing Arts. Keynote remarks by Thomas Ransom, President of the Virginia Region of Truist Financial, were bookended by performances from the RMC MLK Community Choir.

“Dr. King’s all-too-short 39 years here on Earth truly were profoundly important, and it’s essential that we all keep his legacy alive. As we still today are striving to achieve his important vision,” RMC President Robert R. Lindgren said, welcoming guests to the event. “That’s a vision of inclusion, of non-violence, of respecting the rights of all individuals, and one of promoting the understanding that we are all free Americans, no matter what we might look like or where we might have come from.”

Thomas Ransom has 25 years of banking experience, having previously served as the first head of sales and client experience strategy for Truist Financial. In addition to being a member of the Virginia Governor’s Advisory Council on Revenue Estimates, Ransom also serves on the boards of a variety of non-profits. Last year, he visited RMC’s campus when Truist committed a grant to support RMC’s Leadership Fellows Program, serving as the featured guest at one of the program’s Master Classes.

In his remarks, Ransom highlighted King’s activism through non-violent resistance, from the Montgomery bus boycott, to marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, to the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. He also reflected on how Jim Crow laws and other acts of segregation are not a relic of a distant past, but a reality that people alive today experienced.

“I recently took my family to Shreveport, Louisiana, and I wanted them to spend time with their great-grandmother. She was born just five years after Dr. King, so she knows a thing or two about how difficult it was, especially in the Deep South,” Ransom said. “My parents went to segregated schools right here in Virginia. They couldn’t sit at the counter of our local drugstore and eat a meal because of the color of their skin.”

Ransom also analyzed one of King’s sermons from 1967, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” Those three dimensions include length, the rational concern for one’s own wellbeing and to meet one’s goals; breadth, the ability to prioritize the wellbeing of others; and height, one’s spiritual call and purpose.

In summarizing his remarks, Ransom recalled an old Baptist hymn sung at his childhood church, “May The Work I’ve Done Speak For Me.”

Music played a key role in the celebration, with members of the RMC MLK Community Choir representing the RMC student body, Patrick Henry High School, Ebenezer Baptist Church Richmond, Brown Grove Baptist Church, Mount Zion Baptist Church Mechanicsville, and the Town of Ashland. The choir was directed by Dr. Antonio Hunt, RMC’s Director of Choral Activities.

The audience joined the choir in an opening selection of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Gospel artist Cora Harvey Armstrong performed as a soloist for special selection “He Never Failed Me Yet,” and the ceremony concluded with a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”