Countywide : 100 People Defy Rain in King March

About 100 chanting people braved the rain and a chill wind Friday to show unity and a commitment to the goals of Martin Luther King Jr. by marching from a nearby park to UC Irvine.

The marchers included residents and students from elementary school to graduate school who brought umbrellas along with their resolve to keep alive the struggle for civil rights that King helped lead during the 1950s and ‘60s. King, a Baptist minister assassinated in 1968, would have turned 64 on Friday.

“If it wasn’t for him and other black leaders, we wouldn’t be in integrated schools, getting a good education, or even able to go into all the restaurants,” said Justin Isaac, 12, a seventh-grader at Rancho San Joaquin Intermediate School in Irvine.

UCI has organized the march and a rally on King’s birthday for each of the past 12 years.

The march is held to develop unity among African-Americans and to help them recommit to the struggle for equality that King helped create, said Akil K. Khalfani, march organizer and UCI coordinator for the educational opportunity and student affirmative action programs.

“We’re not marching to City Hall to say that there’s an abuse from the police,” Khalfani said. “We’re not necessarily protesting anything. But we’re saying that there are still certain injustices in society.”

For some, the annual march on King’s birthday has become a tradition.

“Dr. King has always been a very important part of our history,” said Helena Viramontes, 38, a graduate student at UCI who has brought her 9-year-old daughter, Pilar, and 7-year-old son, Francisco, to the march for the past seven years.

“My husband and I are children of the ‘60s, and we want to bring this tradition up to our children--the struggle and realities that Dr. King struggled against,” she said.

After the march from William R. Mason Regional Park to the university, the wet group attended a rally in the student center. Several speakers reminded the students of the need to continue King’s struggle for equality.

Christine Moseley, coordinator for a freshman transition program at UCI, recounted several face-to-face encounters with racism while she was a child in Virginia and a college student in Illinois. When she attended Western Illinois University, Moseley said, she knew of King’s actions but didn’t think she could do anything to help.

An experience at a drugstore soda fountain changed her mind, she said. As soon as she sat down, white diners moved away and the waitress ignored her.

“I said, ‘Excuse me, miss, could you help me?,’ ” Moseley said. “And she said, ‘We don’t allow niggers in here.’ ”

Minutes later, several deputies showed up and asked her to leave. Her fright froze her to the chair, she said, so they lifted her out and tossed her into the street.

Although that incident was long ago, Moseley said, racist attitudes and discrimination remain. Whether the racism exists when apartment owners lie about vacancies, or when bankers deny a loan they would have approved for a white person with worse credit, “here, it’s alive and well,” she said.

Joseph White, director of African-American studies at UCI, said blacks will have to continue to struggle to put the country’s priorities in order. Levels of poverty and crime remain high among blacks, White said.

And even though whites have tried to move out of black-dominated neighborhoods to escape the problems rather than helping to find solutions, the problems keep following them, he said.

“You can move and you can move and you can move until you’re in the ocean,” White said. “(But) we’re all in this together, and white folks are going to find out they’re in it with us.”