Thousands Reflect on King’s Legacy

Americans on Monday marked the Martin Luther King Day holiday with low-key parades and speeches honoring the memory of the nation’s leading apostle of nonviolent social change.

In Los Angeles, the annual Kingdom Day Parade rolled more than two miles on Martin Luther King Boulevard past crowds that were three to six deep.

In the Deep South, crowds gathered at Baptist churches where the slain Nobel Peace Prize winner had preached.

And in Washington, President Clinton visited a retirement home to heed his own call for Americans to spend the holiday doing good works.

Clinton and Vice President Al Gore joined Americorps volunteers in tearing down a wall as part of renovations at the Regency House retirement home. The bluejean-clad president attacked the wall with zeal and cited the words in one of King’s favorite hymns: “If I can help somebody . . . then my living will not be in vain.”

Gore marked the day by announcing that the administration will request a 15% increase in federal spending on civil rights enforcement.

In California, aides to state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer vowed to press ahead with his plan to add three lawyers at the state Department of Justice to pursue civil rights complaints, raising the staff to six.

At the Los Angeles parade, there were high school bands, drill teams, floats, clowns, tumblers, civil rights activists and politicians, but not enough black celebrities to suit Frank Stoner, a 76-year-old retired aerospace worker.

“It’s a shame,” said Stoner, commenting on the dearth of celebrities above the recognition level of, say, a television anchor. “This is a major holiday, and I think this is something they should participate in.”

Others in attendance said they were impressed by the racial and ethnic diversity of parade participants.

“I like the celebration. I like the diversity, I like being here with friends,” said 27-year-old Eric Johnson, a minister from Santa Monica.

In Venice, about 300 people gathered at McClendon Community Center to unveil a wall of 400 hand-painted tiles meant to call to mind King’s visions of peace and harmony.

Juan Carlos Munoz-Hernandez, an art teacher who helped design the wall, said the tile painting “brought a lot of people from different ethnicities together. This kind of project should be in every neighborhood.”

At the annual King Day march in Oxnard, John Hatcher, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, recalled the segregated South of 40 and 50 years ago when African Americans were denied the vote.

“If you go back into history and look at the struggle of the black man, we had to fight just to have the right to vote, to go to school,” Hatcher said. “Now we have all these rights under the law. . . . We are part of the Constitution that left us out for so many years.”

Darlene Long-Shorts of Irvine wanted to ensure that her children understand that history. So she brought them to a celebration at St. James Missionary Baptist Church in Santa Ana to learn about King “and how we got to this point.”

“Because of him,” she said, “we are able to vote, we don’t sit at the back of the bus, we don’t drink in different drinking fountains.”

King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to help sanitation workers striking for better working conditions and wages. He was 39.

His birthday, which by law is celebrated on the third Monday in January, became the 10th federal holiday in 1986. It was the first new holiday to be authorized since Congress designated Thanksgiving in 1941.

King would have been 70 last week.

At Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King and his father preached, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Monday gave thanks to King and to other American civil rights leaders for paving the way for the end of apartheid in his country.

“We drew enormous courage from your history,” he told the packed church, while observing that the American journey from slavery to segregation and then to freedom remains a work in progress, haunted by lingering racial divides.

“God has a dream like Martin Luther King Jr.,” Tutu said. “That this community, the wonderful people in this land, will come to realize. . . . ‘Hey we are really members of one family’. . . . Then just maybe, this great country will be able to say truly, ‘Free at last, thank God almighty we’re free at last.’ ”

At the same church, Northern Ireland nationalist leader and Nobel laureate John Hume accepted the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize on Monday, saying that King’s example laid the groundwork for peace in Northern Ireland.

Other cities celebrated the holiday in a variety of ways, with perhaps the most creative approach taken by Cleveland, which opened its museums and public transportation systems free of charge.