King Festival Speakers Assail Racism

The kickoff rally for the 15th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Week Festival sounded an unusually strident note Friday as speakers denounced what they see as a resurgence in racism, violence and police brutality.

“The mean spirit of lynching in the United States has not yet ended,” the Rev. James Lawson, pastor of Holman United Methodist Church, told a supportive gathering of about 100 at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. “America has become more racist than ever.”

Lawson said that because of America’s policy of reacting with military force throughout the world, and because of the media’s failure to teach children that violence is wrong, “our society has become more violent than ever before.

“Martin Luther King and his movement once changed America,” Lawson said, “but his . . . philosophy of nonviolence . . . now needs to be restored and reinvigorated.”

State Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), who is running for the Board of Supervisors seat being vacated by Kenneth Hahn, railed against incidents of police violence, a subject that has received nationwide attention since the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

“Something we have to watch very closely is not only the police beatings, but their use of dogs,” she said, referring to charges that the Los Angeles Police Department condones the use of dogs in attacks on blacks and other minorities.

“Remember how dogs were used in the ‘60s?” she asked, reminding her audience how law enforcement officers in the South used to unleash them on civil rights activists. “Well, they’re back again.”

Joe Hicks, executive director of the local branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was founded by King, said it is time for the city to “listen to, receive and use” King’s philosophy of nonviolence.

Mayor Tom Bradley struck the most conciliatory tone at the gathering, urging blacks to recall the ideals espoused by King as they pursue their search for “justice and economic equality.”

The weeklong festival, which begins Monday, commemorates King’s birth on Jan. 15, 1929. Festivities will include an interfaith prayer breakfast, a golf tournament and an awards dinner.

The seventh annual nationwide celebration of the King holiday will be on Jan. 20.