King’s Life: A Legacy of Nonviolence

Looking out across a sea of predominantly black faces and green fatigues Tuesday, the Rev. James D. Carrington called on the 500 people at the Marine Corps Air Station Chapel in El Toro to “acknowledge the irony of our problem” in commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

The standing-room-only crowd, including base commander Brig. Gen. W. A. Bloomer, had come to honor the memory of the slain civil rights leader who also opposed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, utilized tactics of civil disobedience and cited Mohandas K. Gandhi as his philosophical mentor.

Carrington, pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church in Fullerton, recalled that when he served in the U.S. Navy in the early 1950s, the military considered him, like other blacks, best fit to serve as a steward or to shine shoes.

Today, the minister said, black Marine officers are able “to live in very nice houses” on and off the base.

‘You Wouldn’t Be There’

“If Martin Luther King hadn’t marched,” he told them, “you wouldn’t be there.”

The irony of the gathering, however, was apparent even before Carrington spoke.

Following the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” the congregation was asked to turn to the back of the Armed Forces Hymnal and to rise for the singing of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The stirring song, also known as the “black national anthem,” became popular in the 1930s as an expression of racial pride and of the alienation that many blacks felt from mainstream America.

According to Capt. G.A. Read, a Navy chaplain, the words and music to the song were distributed two years ago by the Department of Defense and pasted into the pages of the standard military hymnal.

“Let us lift up the name of Martin Luther King,” Carrington urged, to shouts of “amen” and hand clapping.

He reminded the young Marines, including about 125 whites, and a handful of civilians that King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his leadership in applying the principles of nonviolent resistance to the struggle for racial equality.”

King was assassinated April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.

Carrington provoked the greatest response when he mentioned military promotion for blacks with ambitions to “get up the ladder.”

“You may have this captain or this sergeant who is standing in the way,” the minister said, someone unable to see through the “veil of bias” or whose attitude is, simply, “ ‘I’m not going to promote a black to command.’ ” King’s message, which Carrington said is relevant today, is that “change means some pain--it shakes up the status quo.”

As jets roared overhead, Carrington said attitudes toward promotion involve “the issue of respect” and admitted that, after such pointed remarks, “they may not invite me back” to the base.

At UC Irvine, Martin Luther King’s birthday, Jan. 15, was marked by a march and rally sponsored by the Black Student Union, an umbrella organization of a dozen clubs, fraternities and sororities.

About 40 students, staff members and faculty members marched behind a black, red and green banner, a so-called “black liberation flag,” from William R. Mason Regional Park to the University Center.

Some chants and banners focused on the condition of blacks in South Africa. The chants included, “Free the people, free the land, free all South Africans” and “From Southern California to South Africa.”

At one point in the march, as enthusiasm seemed to wane and the chanting trailed off, the group was halted and exhorted by Erylene Piper Mandy, a 31-year-old graduate student and civil rights activist.

“Forty people can change the world,” she said, as a group of young white tennis players observed the march from across the street. “That’s the legacy of Dr. King.”

“I’m normally not one to march or yell,” said Arthur Resnikoff, 42, a psychologist at the university’s counseling center who marched and joined the chanting. He said he participated because he saw Martin Luther King “not only as a black and a black leader, but as a leader for peace.”

Christine Hall, a counselor in psychology at the UCI Medical School, told about 200 people in front of the University Center that they had “a lot to pay back for the people who died for us” in the civil rights movement.

Identifying herself as a member of the 1960s generation and still a civil rights activist, Hall told the students in the crowd that “we need you for your energy and your idealism.”