When Bettina Love starts rolling, her voice is strong, her message powerful, the microphone amplifying the words, her arms and hands a part of the delivery. 

Dr. Love was the keynote speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on Tuesday, January 20, jump-starting a week of MLK activities on campus that include workshops for students on Thursday, January 22, and student performances and a poetry slam on Friday, January 23. Dr. Love is an educator, author, and public speaker. On this day she was honoring Dr. King, the American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was assassinated in 1968. But she was also honoring many others who surrounded Dr. King, including his wife, Coretta Scott King; gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, openly gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and nonbinary activist and lawyer Pauli Murray.   

After Dr. Love spoke, she met and conversed with students and faculty and answered questions in an informal setting. 

Her address, she said in an interview, “was about MLK’s legacy but also about the legacy of justice.” 

“He is an amazing figure,” she continued, “but I also wanted to show today that it’s all of us — it’s all of us — and there were so many amazing people around him who loved him, took care of him, and took his message even further. So our job is to keep carrying his message, just like everyone who inspired his message, influenced his message. He was a messenger, but he was inspired and loved by so many people to carry that message.” 

Dr. King was indeed the headliner, and when he spoke, he preached. His oratory captivated his listeners, whether in his church, away from the spotlight, or in front of hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington in 1963. Yet in the background, his wife, Coretta Scott King, was always there. She was an activist even before they met.  As a slide behind Dr. Love said in part, Coretta Scott King once said she loved being his wife and a mother, but she had more to give: “I didn’t just emerge after Martin died. I was always there and involved.”   

Dr. King’s speech at the March on Washington, noted Dr. Love, is known as the “I Have A Dream” speech. But the title of the prepared speech was “Normalcy — Never Again.” As he was delivering that speech, powerful in its own right, something was missing, as Ms. Jackson, a longtime friend and confidant who had sung at the event and was sitting near the podium, knew in her heart. During a brief pause about 15 minutes into Dr. King’s speech, Ms. Jackson called out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin, tell ’em about the dream!” 

“The next three minutes is what would give us civil rights, what would give us voting rights,” Dr. Love told the convocation crowd. “The ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, probably the best speech ever, is freestyle.” Projecting a video recording of the speech, Dr. Love pointed out that Dr. King never looked down during this part of the speech. 

After her convocation address, Dr. Love answered questions on and off the stage and then headed to varsity girls basketball practice, just hours before she would board a plane to return to her home in Atlanta, Ga. She didn’t attend the practice just to observe, though; she had brought along a bag with sneakers and workout clothes. She got on the court with the girls as they did various drills getting ready for their next game. Jump in where and when you want, head coach Adrian Stewart ’90 told her. So she did. Basketball has been influential in her life. 

The woman who really needs no microphone, whose many gifts include an ability to hold an audience, owes a lot to Mike Nally, her basketball coach in high school at Edison Tech in Rochester, N.Y.  

“He is like a father to me,” she said in the interview after the convocation. “We still talk to this day. I stay at his home. He's a great man. He told me a long time ago — I was 14 years old — he called me rookie. He said, ‘Rookie, you've got the gift of gab.’ And I didn’t understand what he meant, and he said, ‘You can go into any room and you can talk.’ He said, ‘Don't lose that.’ I was 14 years old, a basketball player, and that’s all I knew.” 

But after her playing days ended, “I realized he was right. I’ve got something else. And so it was how to build this craft. It was a lot of just ... flaws and messing up and trying to be the best speaker I can be. And what I realized, more than anything, it was reading — because if you’ve got a bag of goods up there, even if you fumble, you have a lot to draw on.” 

She has a lot to draw on. Dr. Love is a Columbia University professor and the author of a New York Times bestseller, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. The book earned her a Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, and she was named a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She has another bestseller, We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. And she has used her “gift of gab” to give more than 750 speeches, according to her website. 

Dr. Love said she still plays some adult league basketball, and it showed as she moved through the on-court drills. “Basketball,” she said as she stretched before getting on the court, has given her “everything ... taught me how to take criticism, taught me community, teamwork.” 

And humility. She played her freshman and sophomore years in college at Old Dominion University and her last two years, the 2000–01 and 2001–02 seasons at the University of Pittsburgh. That meant she faced UConn, including the Huskies of the 2001–02 season, which had what many consider the best starting five in women’s college basketball, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones, and Tamika Williams. That UConn team won a national title and was undefeated.    

“What was that like?” one just had to ask. 

“It was losing with pride,” Dr. Love said. “That’s all you could do is lose with pride. ... I would say, I don’t know what [coach] Geno [Auriemma] does, but I have never played girls that strong. I don’t think people talk about that enough. He recruits girls who are physical and they are strong, and I remember playing [forward] Swin Cash. I had never played anyone in that position who was that strong. Was she better than me, yes, but she was just physically strong. It’s like a 12-round boxing match, and the first two rounds you’re ok, but then they are wearing you down physically. They are more athletic, they have high basketball IQs, and they are physically strong. And I think that is his special sauce. So I will never be a UConn fan because I got beat over and over by them, but as someone who loves the game of women’s basketball, I just love what UConn has done. It’s just beautiful.” 

The same can be said about the message she delivers to an audience. That’s a slam dunk.