Celebrating the life, work, and beliefs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the city of Lewisburg, the MLK Celebration Committee, and the many volunteers and participants involved gathered for a march and service dedicated to Dr. King on Monday, January 20.
Before marching through downtown Lewisburg, Lewisburg Mayor Beverly White, organizer Larry Davis, and Pastor Gene Fullen of John Wesley United Methodist Church opened the day in front of the Greenbrier County Courthouse on the steps of attorney Paul Detch’s office.
“Welcome to my city. Welcome to our city. Welcome to God’s city, most of all,” said White. “It has not gone unnoticed by me that I stand here as mayor because of all the hard work that others have done for us, and a lot of them were white people. You don’t know what that means, when we all come together, because everybody thinks we do it by ourselves, we don’t, we do it together. Now we’re going to march to the church with love.”
After the march and lunch, everyone gathered in Lewisburg United Methodist Church for the celebration of King’s life. During the service, as White took the stage to speak and read Lewisburg’s Martin Luther King Jr. Week Proclamation, the audience welcomed her with a standing ovation.
“All the works of our civil rights leaders has made it possible for me to stand here today,” White said. “I’ve read that the key to the prosperous city is love. Lewisburg will be loved and will be prosperous and that’s because of all of our love for each other.”
Throughout the event, music celebrating life, religion, and people ran through the church – Nevaeh Traynham and Christopher Winston gave breathtaking solo vocal performances of several pieces of music. Members of High Rocks also rose up with a song, inviting the entire audience to sing with them.
In preparation for the day in Greenbrier and Monroe counties, students were invited to submit to an essay contest to honor King. The essays asked the children to consider what King meant when he said “love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” The contest winners, including Ada Estep, Andrew Blake, Rylee Ward, Becca Lee, Micah Lane, and Maya Frank, read their now award-winning essays.
“The answer to a more peaceful world is love,” read Lane. “The answer is caring about others and having more empathy for them and being understanding and not judging them for being a friend. I truly believe love will lead to a better world and a world where people will feel where someone cares about them and they are important. In a world with more love, people won’t be scared of rumors being spread or being lonely. Instead, people will feel excited and free to share ideas with and help their community grow and improve. People in a world with more love would also feel more free to be themselves without the fear of being criticized or made fun of.”
The ceremony’s keynote speaker, Dr. Joseph Evans, is a native of Lewisburg and now serves as the Dean of the Morehouse School of Religion in Atlanta, GA. He spoke on the life and work of King and placed an emphasis on both his early and late work pushing for justice. Drawing a comparison between John the Baptist and King through the perspective of writer James Baldwin, Evans spoke of the willingness of both to set aside the privilege of their birth in order to help others. King was born to preachers on both sides of his family, a “aristocratic family, though in a segregated Atlanta,” and raised in a “bastion of faith,” Ebenezer Baptist Church.
“[King’s] privilege led him to [Crozer Theological Seminary], where he integrated that space and was one of the elite students,” explained Evans. “So much so that he left there and went to Boston University, where he earned his PhD in Systematic Theology by the time he was 26 years old. Black is beautiful, and King himself was a genius thereof. But that wasn’t why Baldwin was attracted to him – Baldwin was attracted to Dr. King because he found that King was willing to put down his privilege to serve a much nobler and larger cause.”
Although King is revered now, Evans spoke of a time where his ideas were shamed and dismissed, when many would band together to prevent his vision for liberty.
“King, as you know, entered into a movement, sacrificed his life, did all that he could to empower people who, in his time, did not understand what he was really even talking about,” Evans said. “Let us not forget that the nation that I was raised in and you were raised in was filled with tawdry hatred and had a dissent against this man and the movement that he led. We can’t just gloss over that. … I want to disabuse you today here of the Public Broadcasting System version of Dr. King. You know, that sanitized version where we’re all singing Kumbaya and forgetting that his blood was spilled so that we might be here now. There was a radical King after 1963.”
Evans spoke to his experiences with Wyatt Walker, chief of staff for King. Evans explained Walker once told him a story: “[King] came back from Washington and they all felt good about his ‘I Have A Dream.’ They were … at a baker’s restaurant in Atlanta. They were all celebrating, thinking the movement would be over shortly. Then a brooding King oftentimes would withdraw to a side. [Walker] went over and asked ‘Martin, what’s wrong?’ He said he’ll never forget the look on King’s face when he said ‘Wyatt, this movement this segregation, this white supremacy, this white hegemony. It will not end until there is economic justice.’ We know that is true because from that point forward, Dr. King and his staff began to plan the Poor People’s Campaign.”
Before his death, King wrote a book attempting to address this idea, titled “Where Do We Go From Here?”
“The book was written in 1967, the latter part, and Dr. King did not live to see it published. In the book, Dr. King said ‘If we want to avoid chaos and have community, then either we are going to have to achieve full employment or guaranteed income.’ And I think that redistribution of wealth may have been too much for empire. Before the book would be published, Dr. King was dead.”
Evans called for King’s vision of not only political justice, but economic justice as well.
“You are also aware that 5 percent of the American public controls 70 percent of all income and wealth,” Evans said. “You know that when private interests exceeds public interest, there is no democracy in the land. We live in an [oligarchy], we live in a hegemonic process, and without rights there can be no justice in the land.”
Bringing the event to a close, a round of applause and thanks were held for the MLK Celebration Committee, the participants, the volunteers, the sponsors, and everyone who came to honor the fallen Dr. King.
Read more in the Tuesday, January 21, 2020, edition of The West Virginia Daily News.
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