By Jason Lewis
OW Contributor
“If you want to be important, wonderful. If you want to be recognized, wonderful. If you want to be great, wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest amongst you, shall be your servant. That’s the new definition of greatness. By giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1968.
On April 8, 1968, four days after Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, U.S. Rep.John Conyers (an African American Democrat from Michigan), and U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, (an African American Republican from Massachusetts), introduced a bill in Congress to make King’s birthday a national holiday.
More than a decade later, after years of sermons, lectures, and meetings by a number of preachers, politicians, activists and celebrities, the bill was first brought to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. It fell five votes short of passage.
In 1980, Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, testified before the Senate to establish a national historic site for her late husband as part of the King Center that she established in Atlanta. The King Center found support within the corporate community, and with the aid of Stevie Wonder’s hit single “Happy Birthday,” they were able to collect six million signatures for a petition to Congress to pass the bill.
On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan grudgingly signed a bill to create the federal holiday to honor Dr. King, and it was first observed in 1986.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act, which designated that King’s birthday was not only a national holiday, but also a day service. The federal holiday commission, which Mrs. King chaired, had the responsibility to build programming around throughout the country around community service. The goal was “To make it a day on, not a day off.”
Honoring Dr. King on his birthday was not designed to simply give Americans a day off from work, but it was to encourage people to go out in their communities and participate in community service projects, which is what Dr. King dedicated his life to.
“The holiday was not only meant to honor Dr. King, but also the spirit of the movment that he led and represented,” said Ernest Brooks III, Special Assistant to the CEO at the King Center. “So that as a country, we had a permanent day in our nation’s history, annually, to recognize the accomplishments and leadership of Dr. King and those in the Civil Rights Movement. To advocate for civil rights, human rights, and social justice in America. To remind us that this was not always the case. That it was a hard and long fought struggle. People, including Dr. King, gave their lives for that work.
“This isn’t just another holiday to take off of work, but it’s to remember the sacrifices of Dr. King and others, and to continue to work to make America the place that it claims to be,” Brooks continued. “Which is a place of liberty and justice for all freedom and inequality.”
People are encouraged to volunteer in their communities at foodbanks, clean up neighborhood parks, participate in beautification programs at a local school, support the elderly, and work with other community service programs of that nature, Brooks explained.
“The King Center, as part of our King holiday observance activities has adopted one of the local schools that is in the neighborhood where the center is housed in Atlanta,” Brooks said. “We ask that people around the country do what ever service is needed in their community to help make it a better place.”
Many people in the African American community of Los Angeles celebrate the holiday by attending the annual Kingdom Day Parade, which travels through the Black community on Martin Luther King Boulevard. While thousands of people partake in the festivities of the day, many organizations use the event to perform community service projects in the spirit of the civil rights leader.
This year, members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc, of which Dr. King was a member, and members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, of which Coretta Scott King was a member, have created a parteneship to conduct their community service projects—will be at the parade registering people to vote. This effort is a part of Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Community Impact Day, and Alpha Phi Alpha’s A Voteless People Is A Hopeless People community service projects.
“When I think about Dr. King, specifically MLK Day, the words that come to my mind are: ‘Legacy, Civil Rights, and Dream,’ said Jamin Butler of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. “Dr. King’s legacy is rich and so all encompassing, that literally every living person has benefited by his works and words. It is in honor of his legacy, that on his national holiday, we are organizing community-based events and programming with a focus on education and self-empowerment. More specifically as our country races towards the 2016 election day, we are here in the heart of the Leimert Park-Crenshaw District promoting voter education and voter awareness.
“Today in 2016, Dr. King’s dream lives on, as the fight for our civil and human rights is just as strong as it was in the 1960s,” Butler stressed. “In fact, erasing ‘income inequality’ is an issue Dr. King championed, which is currently being discussed at all levels of government today. And we want our communities and our citizens to have a voice and a vote in creating the legislation and change, that Dr. King dreamed about, the change we all prayed and worked so hard for.”
“The best way to honor the memory and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and our sister Coretta Scott King is to make sure we are registered voters,” said Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., Alpha Gamma Omega Chapter President Dr. Edna Burems
Other fraternities also use the parade to administer their community service projects. Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc, and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc., march in the parade alongside the boys that the two groups mentor.
Outside of the parade, there are many organizations throughout Los Angeles that are involved in community service opportunities. In the spirit of Dr. King and to truly recognize him, people are following the exampe of these two groups to use the day as a “day on,” “not a day off.”
Honoring a legacy: Martin Luther King and the National Day of Service
By Gregg Reese
OW Contributor
The beginning of the year brings with it perhaps the most important holiday for the African American community—Martin Luther King Day (followed by Black History Month), officially observed on the third Monday of January.
As expected, scores of parades and other festivities will be held to continue the tradition of this relatively young (less than 40 years old) celebration, which was initiated with its fair share of controversy over the opposition of conservative elements in the country, including Sen. Jesse Helms (R), of North Carolina.
Listing all of the commemorations and events taking place in Los Angeles County alone (with some 88 separate cities) would be a formidable task (detailed info may be accessed in the OW article on page four).
King lived in a period during which cultural and social norms were challenged and deposed, or at least dramatically transformed, as the country struggled with redefinitions of equality, morals, political correctness, and social and sexual permissiveness.
A half century later, the country is once again embroiled in many of the same issues, albeit superficially amended to suit the times.
Today energy is no longer being expelled on the length of a man’s hair, or the color of his skin, or manner of dress. Instead, we focus on a person’s spiritual beliefs, the way they worship, the location of their birth and how they came to be in this particular locale (this in a country virtually comprised of immigrants from every corner of the globe).
Apart from all this, the country struggles with threats to the fundamental cornerstones of our society. A thriving middle class, considered the backbone of the national psyche and a level most of the population lived at (or at least could aspire to) not so long ago, appears to be going the way of the horse and buggy.
The Rev. Dr. William S. Epps, pastor at Los Angeles’ Second Baptist Church, readily offers revisiting the teachings of the past to deal with our contemporary conundrum.
“We should back up and think of the vision of Martin Luther King,” a vision he notes that was previously articulated in the U.S. Constitution.
Dr. Epps specifically points to the last book written by King, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” published in 1967, the year before his untimely death.
This particular tome is interesting because it was written during a rare period of isolation for the civil rights leader, after more than a decade leading the movement. Holed up in the seclusion of a rented house in Jamaica, King was able to enjoy a rare period of deep reflection and self-examination during the course of completing what turned out to be his final manuscript.
At this point in his life, King was able to ponder the experiences of confronting the deeply entrenched racial caste system of his native southern United States, as well as the more clandestine but no less formidable restrictions of the north’s inner cities. Savoring the tangible legislative victories like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he saw the obstacles that remained ahead, some which still exist now, a half century after his demise.
In spite of the effort put into this summation of King’s life’s work, Rev. Epps believes the passing decades have shown a trend leading “… more to chaos than community.”
A logical step towards reconciling the myriad social problems that dominate the headlines are simple yet profound measures that may be undertaken in our daily lives, for instance in Epps’ view, a collective cultivation of “respect and regard for one another.”
The considerable gains and victories of the Civil Rights Era have been eroded by legislative measures that, intentionally or unintentionally, have been implemented by law enforcement zealots in recent years. Epps points to 2010’s landmark “The New Jim Crow,” by legal scholar Michelle Alexander as an example of indictment of the events perpetrated towards the accomplishment of the War on Crime, or more specifically the War on Drugs.
The efforts initiated within the criminal justice system to superficially effect a decrease in law-breaking and felony misconduct have succeeded in justifying discrimination and racial profiling, resulting in the unprecedented incarceration of people of color (although impoverished Whites may be similarly affected). This in turn, has resulted in a state of involuntary separation of ethnic or racial groups long after formally defined segregation was declared illegal, almost making the achievements of King and other activists, Black and White, futile.
“The struggle continues. We have not arrived,” Epps concludes.
Community organizer Najee Ali, founder and executive director of Project Islamic Hope, might be seen in some circles as a polar opposite of William Epps, being that one is a Muslim activist while the other is a Christian minister in today’s climate of unease between the new religions. This makes it all the more intriguing that these two individuals from opposite ends of the spectrum find commonality in their world view.
“If Martin Luther King were alive today, his message would be one of unity, regardless of whether we share the same belief system, race, or religion,” Ali says.
Like Epps, Ali believes the lessons of the Civil Rights Era remain relevant in the turmoil of contemporary world events.
