Dr. Boykin Sanders wore a huge smile as he walked into the Claude G. Perkins Living and Learning Center on the campus of Virginia Union University Saturday night, where about 200 people were gathered for a reception and banquet in his honor.

Attendees broke into applause as he strode in holding his 3-year-old granddaughter, Sage, in his arms. Many were his former students at VUU, where Dr. Sanders has served as a professor and mentor for the last 32 years.

The event also was a celebration of Dr. Sanders’ 70th birthday.

In addition to his granddaughter, Dr. Sanders was accompanied by his proud daughter, Christa Sanders, who made the trip from her home in Ghana, and his good friend and former Harvard University classmate, Dr. Cornel West, who delivered the evening’s keynote address.

Members of Dr. Sanders’ family also traveled from Miami, Philadelphia, Durham, N.C., and his hometown of Rembert, S.C., to attend the banquet.

Dr. Sanders currently serves as distinguished professor of New Testament Studies and Greek and senior research scholar in religion and culture at the VUU Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology.

“I’m here not to celebrate myself, but to celebrate all my students and all those people who have contributed to my life in significant ways,” Dr. Sanders told the Free Press prior to the ceremony.

“I’ve been telling (my students) for some time I want to see them again and thank them for all they have done for me.”

In his 20-minute address, Dr. West, a renowned activist, author and commentator who teaches philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, bemoaned the recent highly publicized incidents of white police officers killing unarmed black men, but said it’s nothing new.

“Every 28 hours for the last 10 years, police have shot down some black and brown young person,” he said.

He said the recent slayings “are just the tip of the iceberg.”

He said some people have asked him why he’s “so hard” on President Obama. “Boykin taught me at Harvard, ‘Brother West, speak your truth. It’s not about popularity.’

“You got a black president, a black attorney general and a black director of homeland security, and still every 28 hours (black men) are getting shot and not one policeman goes to jail. That’s a Keith Sweat moment, ‘Something, something just ain’t right,’ ” Dr. West said, borrowing the title of the singer-songwriter’s hit from the late 1980s.

He also called unacceptable the high murder rate nationally of African-American young people, high unemployment in African-American communities and the fact that too many black people are working for low wages.

“But when it comes to prisons, the money starts flowing,” he said.

He concluded by pointing to Dr. Sanders and saying, “We love you brother.

“We know even at 70, you are still swinging like Ella Fitzgerald and Muhammad Ali for justice, motivated by love, but grounded in the blood of the cross. And we want to swing with you.”

Dr. Sanders humbly told the audience, “I just tried to do my best and I tried to contribute something to our people. I have a deep sense of my mission that somehow or another, we have to restore our people.”

He encouraged the audience to try to emulate Jesus’ life of service to others.

A Free Press reporter asked Dr. West before the event about his ongoing public feud with Georgetown University professor, commentator and activist Michael Eric Dyson, whom Dr. West mentored for several decades.

Dr. Dyson alleged in an article last week published in The New Republic — “The Ghost of Cornel West” — that Dr. West’s personal attacks on President Obama, as well as on other activists and academics including Dr. Dyson who have defended the president, have led to a loss of credibility for Dr. West.

Dr. West responded to the article through Facebook, saying the focus should be on pressing social issues. He added that “character assassination is the refuge of those who hide and conceal these issues in order to rationalize their own allegiance to the status quo.”

He told the Free Press he did not want to talk about the article or his response.

“We are here for Brother Sanders,” he said.

Christa Sanders told the audience about traveling with her father to Ethiopia in 1999 to feed famine victims. She called it “a life-changing event.”

Recently married, Ms. Sanders has worked for several years in Accra, Ghana, as director of the Webster University Ghana Campus.

She called her father a humble man and said he is “so incredibly dedicated to his institution and its students.”

Ms. Sanders singled out for praise longtime family friends Free Press President/Publisher Jean P. Boone; son, Raymond Boone Jr., Free Press vice president of new business development; and daughter, Regina Boone, a photographer with the Detroit Free Press, who was Ms. Sanders’ classmate at Spelman College in Atlanta.

She also paid tribute to her late mother, Minerva, and Raymond H. Boone Sr., the late editor/publisher of the Free Press.

“I know they are looking down on us and are so pleased,” she said.