Jade Rutland remembers eagerly awaiting news in 1996 of whether she’d be awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship to attend Emory. For her, there was no greater honor.

She had spent the previous summer at an Emory program for high schoolers and found herself “fan-girling” over the MLK Scholars on campus. A year later, seated at the kitchen table with her family, she prepared to open the envelope that held the answer to her future. Her mom had bought a cake with a personalized message to soften the blow in case Rutland received bad news.

The cake’s message: “You’re number one in my book.”

Condolences weren’t necessary, however; Rutland got the scholarship.

“It meant a lot to me,” she says. “It meant a lot to my family.”

Since its origin in 1970, the MLK Scholarship has played a significant role in Emory’s history and is now part of the Woodruff Scholars program. Applications are open to students from the metro Atlanta area.

The MLK Scholarship prioritizes service-minded students and is rooted in the practice of King’s ideals, says Carol Henderson, vice provost for diversity and inclusion, chief diversity officer and adviser to the president. She also notes it has a long line of recipients, from the early 1970s to this year’s cohort, who have shaped Emory and impacted the world beyond.

“King’s life embodied service, leadership and a resolute compassion for the common good,” Henderson says. “That our scholars are drawn from the area he called home continues that legacy. Emory’s mission ‘to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in service to humanity’ links the transformative power of education to service. In service to our city. In service to our state. In service to our global community.”

Amy Lebo, director of the Woodruff Scholars program, says the unifying force among MLK Scholars is their dedication to serving humanity. She describes recipients as “other-oriented and creative leaders who are willing and able to make connections across differences.”

“They are engaged in their communities and willing to be uncomfortable and stretch themselves in unscripted places,” she adds. “Those are all values that relate to the history of MLK and the history of Woodruff.”

Expanding horizons

Hank Ambrose was chair of the Black Student Alliance (BSA) in 1969 when the group advocated the formation of scholarships for a more equitable Emory.

Ambrose was the first in his family to go to college through another scholarship program. “There was no way my parents could have afforded for me to go to college otherwise,” he says.

That year, three Emory faculty members — Charles Strickland, Anthony Orum and Henry Pratt — started an endowment for a scholarship to “demonstrate Emory University’s commitment to Dr. King’s principles of non-violence, brotherhood and justice by assisting worthy students to attend Emory,” according to documents from the time.

The BSA, as well as several other student organizations led by then-SGA president Charles Haynes, raised money to breathe life into the new MLK Scholarship fund. Looking back on those times, Haynes says he was guided by “the ideals of the beloved community King espoused.”

More than 55 years later, the scholarship has opened doors for generations of students — including Curley Bonds, an MLK Scholar who graduated from Emory in 1987. He is currently the chief medical officer of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

In Bonds’ college days, the MLK Scholarship program was small but mighty; he remembers being the only scholar of his class. He also remembers dinners with the likes of the late President Jimmy Carter, who was an Emory University Distinguished Professor at the time, and other notable guests.

Bonds says the scholarship gave him the freedom and confidence to pursue a truly interdisciplinary and unburdened education. He took courses all over the map — in French, art history and literature — despite knowing he would end up in medical school.

“A benefit of the scholarship was being in a community of scholars that all got together and talked about important academic or intellectual topics to stretch your imagination outside the classroom,” he says. “It was just a great incubator for creative growth mentally.”

That interdisciplinary approach shaped how he views his career.

“I think of myself as a person who has somewhat of a technical job but with a humanitarian focus,” Bonds says. “A lot of pre-med students major in biology or chemistry or math, and they go the professional route day one. I was a sociology major, and what I do now on a day-to-day basis is about providing mental-health care based on the social determinants of health.”

Cheryl Turner, who graduated from Emory in 1994, agrees that receiving the scholarship allowed her to expand what she thought was possible. She went on to earn her law degree at Emory and has worked in a variety of legal positions, including with Coca-Cola.

“It created the opportunity for me to think differently about my trajectory and the things that I wanted to do with my life,” she says. “Part of what the King scholarship gave me was the ability to chart my career the way that I wanted to.”

The ‘holy grail’ of scholarships

Starting in the late 1980s, Emory began exclusively awarding the scholarship to high school students from Atlanta Public Schools. It soon developed a reputation as one of the highest honors in the city, says Rutland, who attended Benjamin E. Mays High School.

“It was like the holy grail,” she says.

She recalls that many of the scholars knew each other from middle school, high school or through their churches.

Jonathan Butler was a fellow graduate of Mays High School. When he received the MLK Scholarship in 1992, he recalls his pride in “the prestige associated with it.”

Butler drew inspiration from the program’s acclaimed guest speakers, like filmmaker Ossie Davis and poet Maya Angelou. The events around King Week also hold a special place in his heart.

“My favorite memory is a ceremony when we would get called up on stage and they would recognize us and give us and our parents flowers,” he says. “There’s nothing like being thought of that way — carrying the energy and the weight and the responsibility of your forebears. And knowing that you have been tapped with an awesome responsibility of moving forward the interests, ideas, hopes and dreams of Black people in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Now living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Butler is senior vice president for community development at PartnerTulsa, an organization that works with the city on economic development. One of his primary responsibilities is to help rebuild a community once called the Black Wall Street. In 1921, that area was burned to the ground in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

His time as an MLK Scholar has proved helpful in what he calls “restorative work.”

“My spirit of service was harnessed, honed and developed through the scholarship and my relationship with Emory,” he says — adding that he and his team are putting properties in the area “back into the hands of the community in proactive, intentional and positive ways.”

The MLK Scholarship was also a badge of honor for Matt Weyandt, who graduated in 2001. His experience growing up in Atlanta around civil rights icons sparked a passion for a life of service. His father was the city’s commissioner of community development in the 1980s and would regale him with stories about Andrew Young, John Lewis, Shirley Franklin and other significant Atlanta figures.

“There were these civil rights legends just walking around,” Weyandt says. “You’d run into them on the street. That was the environment I grew up in, getting this kind of exposure that to me was really powerful.”

These encounters and stories helped form his values, which he sharpened as an MLK Scholar and applied to his early career in politics. He served as the campaign manager for John Lewis’ 2012 bid for re-election in the House of Representatives. 

In all of his work — including his current position running the ethically-sourced, Atlanta-based company Xocolatl Chocolate — Weyandt says he seeks to honor the legacy of King and the civil rights leaders who shaped his upbringing.

“There’s a responsibility to keep the dream alive, keep pushing forward and keep trying to make progress,” he says. “That’s definitely something I felt being a part of the scholarship in my time at Emory.”

Carrying the torch

The MLK Scholarship and the broader Woodruff Scholars program continues to provide opportunities for current students like those that have helped shape so many successful alumni.

“We are looking ultimately to develop students in their time at Emory into the changemakers who are going to lead our communities into the future,” Lebo says.

Programming includes professional workshops and an annual retreat focused on personal well-being and career building, as well as cultural enrichment trips to places like Washington, D.C. The program also helps students pursue development opportunities such as study-abroad programs and internships.

Current MLK Scholar Maya Risin is a senior majoring in environmental sciences and biology at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Her connections through the scholarship program have helped her find immersive research opportunities — including a month of field work in the California wilderness to test a treatment on a fungal disease found in amphibians. The only hiccup, she explains, is that she had never been camping before. 

“It was a great experience,” Risin says. “I definitely learned I could do a lot more than I thought I could. I think that’s what pushed me to get into research and was the catalyst for everything now.”

Risin is applying to PhD programs to continue studying infectious diseases.

She also enjoyed the winter retreats to the North Georgia mountains, where scholars participate in workshops and reset before spring semester.

Rutland, who still lives in Atlanta, has been a frequent guest speaker at the retreats. She’s shared everything from tips on networking to personal advice to lessons learned from her career as a managing attorney for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For her, it’s about giving back.

“To whom much is given, much is required,” she says.

As part of Emory’s 2025 King Week, Rutland and other alumni joined current MLK Scholars for an intergenerational breakfast, now an annual event that brings together decades of scholarship recipients.

BreAnna Smith, a senior in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, says her favorite part of being an MLK Scholar is creating bonds through hosting prospective students on campus — and, modeling those who came before her, sharing what she’s learned with the next group of MLK Scholars.

“I keep telling my advisor I’m on a streak,” Smith says. “I’ve hosted three different sets of people, and all of them have gotten the scholarship and ended up coming here. That’s something I’m really proud of, building a community. I don’t have sisters, but I have these girls that I would consider my little sisters and am guiding them through the program.”

Story by Daniel Christian.