Remembering King’s Dream

Residents observed the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday with a low-key march through downtown, speeches and songs, all honoring the memory of the slain civil rights leader.

Activities started early, as a crowd of about 600 gathered at 8 a.m. in downtown’s Plaza Park to pray before marching hand in hand, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Some carried yellow signs reading, “Keep Dr. King’s Dream Alive.”

The marchers made their way across town to the Oxnard Performing Arts Center for a two-hour program dedicated to King and his message of nonviolent protest against racial oppression.

Eli Wiggins of Port Hueneme opened the program by reading part of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.

Afterward, Wiggins said he was honored to read King’s words.

“It’s a speech that will live forever,” Wiggins said. “A hundred years from now, little kids will still remember it. Like the Gettysburg Address.”

Among the speakers was the Rev. Joven Rosario of the First Baptist Church, Port Hueneme, who echoed King’s speech, praying, “Teach us to judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

“Deliver us from the hardening of the attitudes that refuse to listen and learn, and by so refusing condemns us to repeat the sins of the past,” Rosario said.

King was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone in aid of 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 72 on Monday.

Some young members of the Oxnard audience have commemorated the holiday their entire lives, like 12-year-old Dionne Brown, of Oxnard, who said her family attends the Oxnard celebration each year and recalled as a toddler being carried on her father’s shoulders to the event.

She sang as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Choir, made up of youngsters from churches across the county.

Caitlyn Ortenberg, 12, who attends Fremont Intermediate School in Oxnard, got a standing ovation for her first-person presentation as Rosa Parks, talking about how she should not have to sit in the back of the bus.

Many audience members later hugged a surprised Caitlyn, including Ora Lincoln, 70, of Oxnard.

“Sometimes you get impatient because it’s going on too long,” Lincoln said. “But today was beautiful, and hers was a masterpiece.”

Some older audience members saw the day as a moment to recall firsthand experiences of the injustices King worked to abolish.

The Rev. Ernest Morrison Sr., 83, said he was among the first African American sailors in 1936, after a suspension of black Navy recruiting begun in the 1920s.

He joined the Navy, he said, because he heard prejudice was not as rife there as in the Army. But he and his family found Navy life trying in its own way.

When his wife, Mildred, delivered their first child in 1942, she received prenatal care at the military hospital where Ernest was stationed in Portsmouth, Va., but was barred from delivering there.

When she went into labor, the couple had to drive 10 miles to a civilian hospital in Norfolk, Va. Ernest recalled driving around Norfolk trying to find the hospital.

Mildred said her military obstetrician, a German immigrant, was not aware of the restriction until she told him.

The Ladies’ Auxiliary of Portsmouth wrote a complaint to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of the wives of black servicemen, Morrison said, and by the time his wife was ready to give birth for the second time she was permitted to deliver in the military hospital.

The Morrisons were among 15 couples honored for being married 50 years or more. They will celebrate their 61st wedding anniversary next month.

“This day reinvigorates my memory of how bad things were and how far we’ve come,” Ernest said. “But today these generations don’t need to blame anyone living today for the past, what they need to do is to make things better.”

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KING DOUBLE

Martin Luther King Jr. imitator delivers excerpts from three speeches. B7