Added Significance Seen in King Holiday

The Rev. John McReynolds, senior pastor of the oldest African American church in Orange County, explained why the commemoration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday has added significance this year.

“The Republican Party and Gov. [Pete] Wilson have declared that racism doesn’t exist anymore, and that we’re all playing on a level field,” McReynolds said. “But if Dr. King was alive, I believe he would tell the governor that America is reversing course, back to when everybody talked about racial equality but few whites practiced it.”

McReynolds’ Second Baptist Church, founded 75 years ago, has scheduled a weekend of activities to celebrate King’s birthday and honor the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s contributions to the struggle for civil rights.

On Sunday, the church will sponsor a program titled “The Opportunity to Dream Is Now,” where young people will honor King’s accomplishments with speeches and plays beginning at 6 p.m.

The national observance of King’s birthday will be Monday, but his birthday is today. King, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, would have been 69.

The national holiday set aside to honor King has been criticized by opponents for racial and political reasons. That controversy was revisited earlier this month, when mostly white residents of a Riverside community packed a school board meeting to protest the naming of a new high school after the civil-rights leader.

McReynolds, who grew up in Riverside, called the protest “a heightened lack of sensitivity [about] the meaning of the civil-rights movement in this country.”

“It goes to show that a lot of people don’t have any knowledge of who Dr. King was and what he did for our country,” McReynolds said. “There is still a generation of white Americans that has no idea what the struggle was all about, and why Dr. King should be honored with a school that bears his name.”

King’s birthday also will be celebrated by Orange County schoolchildren, including students at Carr Intermediate School in Santa Ana, where 31 Latino sixth-grade students with limited English-speaking ability will perform a five-act play reenacting the Montgomery bus boycott.

King and other black leaders in Montgomery, Ala., began the boycott in December 1955, after Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger and was arrested for violating the city’s segregation laws. The boycott ended about a year later when Montgomery officials agreed to integrate the city’s buses.

“They have difficulty with the language, but they understand Dr. King’s contributions to American history,” teacher Mary Carey said. “By acting it out, they can feel what it was like then. I tell them, ‘What if it had been Hispanics who couldn’t use the drinking fountains or eat in the restaurants?’ ”

Carey, who has taught English as a second language for 10 years, said all of her students are from Mexico or Central American countries. The children will perform at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 23.

“The kids have memorized some songs that are identified with the civil-rights struggle and the times,” Carey said. “They’ll sing ‘If I Had a Hammer’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ The props that we’ve built for the play about the Montgomery bus boycott will allow you to use your imagination.”

Fifth-grade students from Clinton-Mendenhall Elementary School in Garden Grove will re-create a civil-rights march at 9:15 a.m. Friday. The children will march on the school grounds, carrying signs like those carried by civil-rights marchers during the 1960s. The procession will end with a student reading King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

UC Irvine’s 14th annual symposium honoring King ends today. The weeklong event will end with a noon rally at the UCI administration office flagpole, followed by a festival featuring art, gospel music, poetry readings and dancing at 7 p.m. at the UCI Student Center.