On Wednesday Jan. 21, students, faculty, community members and business leaders filled the Show Me Center to attend the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Dinner. This annual dinner celebrates the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and has hosted an array of influential speakers with this year's being award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien, who spoke about the civil rights leader, her own experiences and where she believes America is on the issue of race.

She began her speech by discussing the legacy of King and how it has been interpreted and changed by everyone from famous athletes to congressmen. "Kings words," O'Brien said, "have been leveraged throughout the years to fit individuals' own things."

However, while King's words have been interpreted in various ways, she spoke of a man that many see as larger than life but who was just like any other who had hopes, dreams and even fears. She said he was "plucked from obscurity" and made into the figure we know him as today.

O'Brien studied King heavily while creating the documentary "Words that Changed a Nation" that focused on King's life and work. She spoke of the access she was granted to his personal library during her studies. There she was able to see the speeches he wrote in his own handwriting, and in her speech she spoke of the edits and ideas he had written down.

"America is a dream unfulfilled," O'Brien said King wrote in his personal notes, and said that his vision was to create an America where the unalienable rights that are stated in the constitution are given to every American. She shared that his historic "I Have a Dream Speech" was originally titled 'Normalcy, Never Again." She said his speech was originally given the title because it did not hold the positive and uplifting message that we know it for today. It was a speech about America's failures at the time and where the nation needed work and healing.

She then shared personal stories of growing up in an interracial family, and shared the story of her parents beginning their relationship when their relationship was considered illegal.

"My mother was black and Cuban and my father was white and Australian. And they both went to mass and my mom would walk and my dad drove a car. And every time he would offer her a ride and she would say 'no,' until one day she said 'yes,'" O'Brien said. "And that night they planned a date but every restaurant they went to would not let them in. So my mother brought my father home and cooked him an amazing meal herself."

That discrimination would not be the first they would face in their relationship. Once they decided to marry they had to travel to Washington, D.C., which was one of the few states where interracial marriage was legal in the late 1950s, but they faced much hostility once they returned to the state of Maryland. They even experienced people spitting on them when they walked down the street together, but O'Brien said that her parents did not share the same hostile sentiment toward those who insulted them because her mother told her "We knew America was better than that."

O'Brien also spoke about her documentary series "Black in America" and the challenges that came with creating the program. She spoke of the backlash she received after it aired.

"Some people wondered if I was 'black enough' to be sharing these stories," O'Brien said. She even spoke of bloggers and writers who dissected her appearance, along with her multi-racial family.

She discussed the tension that was felt behind the scenes between herself and producers and the story of a young female student who happened to have parents who were addicted to drugs and alcohol. Producers wanted to make her parents' struggles the focus of the story, but O'Brien fought to keep that separate. She believed that the story was not that of parents with substance abuse issues who have a child who excels in her studies, but that of a hard-working student who excels in her studies who just so happens to have parents with addictions. She said she hoped that by creating programming such as this that stories of minorities can be told in a dignified and impactful way while truthfully reflecting the issues that are happening in our nation.

"Today the focus is not Birmingham, of course, but it is in some ways Ferguson or New York City or LA. It is not Memphis, but it is Fruitvale Station and Oakland," O'Brien said. "And the protests themselves beget protests; should the protesters use violence? Is it 'black lives matter' or is it 'all lives matter'? And does that matter? They are the same issues that Dr. King grappled with 60 years ago -- how do you bring justice and fairness and humanity to the stories of people who are marginalized, people who don't always have a microphone or a platform and whose narratives sometimes are complex and complicated and not necessarily told well by others?"

She connected the legacy of King to that of issues today and what she believed his message to be.

"Dr. King struggled sometimes but his ultimate message, I think, is clear. It is not a fight about the impact of slavery or the 1960s civil rights legislation, it is a fight about being true to a promise, a promise that was made in the very words of our founding fathers that they wrote and Dr. King referenced so many times in the words that he wrote," O'Brien said. "I believe that the legacy of Dr. King is to consider how you stand up and honor people's humanity. What do you stand for? What are you willing to do and what are you willing to stand for?"

The event concluded with university president Kenneth W. Dobbins being honored and presented with a poster depicting all of the event's past speakers. Dobbins, who will retire on June 30, was largely responsible for spearheading the initiative that turned a small breakfast that honored the legacy of King into the large-scale campus event it is today.

Michelle Irby, a member of the Martin Luther King Planning Committee, said she felt the event honored King and that it will help in continuing the dialogue on race that Southeast has been striving for since the recent protests about Ferguson on campus.

"I think that it adds to what we were already talking about in December," Irby said. "We were hoping she would say something we could draw on in further discussions. I think that the intention is for the institution to continue having conversations, so I think she made some poignant points to pull everything together. And from the committees perspective, she did what we were hoping for. I think that she had a great presentation and for the first time in several years I think she made Martin Luther King personal, to talk about his courage or things that he was fearful of. We don't often talk about that part, we often talk about what was his vision or dream, but it was nice to think about him as a person."