Crouching on their hands and knees with paintbrushes in hand, members of the Hubbard Hall MRULE prepared banners to hang at Wharton Center during Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day events.

Each year, Multi-Racial Unity Living Experience students plan special events to take advantage of the day off to celebrate King.

“One of the components of MRULE is activism,” said Lisa Gude, a political science junior and MRULE student leader. “We try to do things to get results.”

Last year, more than 50 MRULE participants took a bus to Ann Arbor to march in support of affirmative action in the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action trial.

This year, the group said it is participating in the community service project Into the Streets. Group members also plan on walking in the MLK march to Wharton.

Along with keynote speaker Julianne Malveaux, sociology senior Steve Serling will speak at Wharton. Serling is the MRULE student leader at Hubbard Hall.

Serling said he planned on talking about...

“There are many different components to MRULE, but the main one is to create genuine friendships and show that everybody is different, no matter what the race,” Serling said.

Holiday or no holiday, each of the six MRULE groups meet weekly in different complexes on campus “to give students an outlet,” to meet people and talk about important issues, Serling said.

At the Hubbard Hall meeting on Monday, Serling and Gude along with student leader Michelle Mascaro, a humanities senior, led a group of 10 participants in a discussion of articles about King’s life.

The articles were excerpts from King’s autobiography, covering issues such as children in the movement, black power, King’s early years and his relationship to Malcolm X. Tiffany Gridiron, a interdisciplinary studies in social science senior and student leader supervisor, chose the articles.

Serling said a lot of people didn’t know what King was really about and thought it would be a good idea to present the articles.

“I didn’t even know as much about MLK as I thought I did,” said Serling after reading the articles.

Events

MRULE is also sponsoring its annual Unity Dance in honor of MLK Day, which will be at the Campus Center in the International Center at 10 p.m. today.

And on Jan. 27, MRULE is presenting a movie and discussion session on “Bamboozled” by Spike Lee at the Campus Center.