(ABC 6 News) – Tuesday was the National Day of Racial Healing, held each year on the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

This year, the Rochester Area Foundation, in partnership with Olmsted County, brought the event to the Med City for the first time, aiming to bring people together to reflect and take meaningful steps toward realizing Dr. King’s vision of a just and equitable society.

“After MLK Day, you’ve heard a lot of great speeches, which are important, you’ve marched, which is really important, you know. What are you gonna do next?” said Wale Elegbede, President of the Rochester branch of the NAACP.

“Our goal really is to have honest and truthful conversations about the truth of systemic racism in our community, the harmful effects that it causes to different communities of color, and how ultimately we can work together to address those and move forward together as a community,” said Amanda Pelley, Equity and Inclusion Manager with the Rochester Area Foundation.

As part of bringing uncomfortable conversations to the light, attendees were asked to partner with a stranger and share a time they felt excluded and time they felt like they belonged.

“I must admit when I first came to the community, I didn’t see another Black person for two weeks, and when I saw this person, he became my best friend,” said George Thompson, who’s been a member of the Rochester community for 56 years. “I felt very excluded. I mean, people didn’t deny me the opportunity to go places, but just don’t feel like you’re wanted.”

In response, Thompson created his own community for Black people in the area, called Trendsetters. “We had a newspaper, we developed a calendar, we had a whole lot of things,” said Thompson. His group is credited with bringing a Black barbershop and women’s hair salon to Rochester, so African Americans wouldn’t have to travel all the way to the twin cities to get haircuts.

“You try to make the world better for those that follow you, and I stood on the shoulders of people who made a lot of things better for me,” said Thompson.

Conversations like the ones had at the Day of Racial Healing are important to Thompson, whose great-grandfather was a slave, and is grateful to Dr. King and everyone who came before him and opened doors to give him the opportunities he, his children and grandchildren have had in life.

“We have many more similarities than we have differences, and the world needs to know that and understand that,” said Thompson. “When you have a variety of ideas, you get better ideas.”

Thompson says he just wants to leave the world a better place for his great-grandchildren, but he worries about them having access to the same opportunities he did.

“The issue of discrimination and racism, that is the biggest thing that our country, I think is really, that I feel is holding our country back from being, you know, even greater,” said Elegbede.

“This year in particular we’ve seen just a resurgence of some of the really negative aspects of racial intolerance,” said Pelley. “It’s more important than ever that we come together as a community and really process what that means for our specific communities.”

The Day of Racial Healing aims to nurture a sense of healing among people of all backgrounds through truth and artistic expression.

At the Rochester event, attendees were all asked to create a piece of artwork symbolizing what racial healing meant to them, and then paste it on the wall with everyone else’s art in a mosaic. Thompson, Elegbede and I all collaborated on a piece together.

Elegbede put five different colors of paper together and cut in in the shape of a heart. In the center of the heart, he drew a picture of the world and wrote the words “love always wins” in a circle around the world. Thompon helped glue everything together and wrote the words “our differences make us stronger around the bottom of the heart. I was asked to make my own addition, and wrote “rise above hate.”

“It was just beautiful,” said Elegbede. “For me, the central stuff was all the colors were there, we had love, you know essentially stressing that love always wins.”

Racial healing in our community might not be achieved overnight, but every conversation had with that goal in mind brings us one step closer.