Mixed emotions at King parade

The Crenshaw High School marching band, in electric blue and gold uniforms, stepped 90-strong in formation down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard during Monday’s parade to commemorate the civil rights leader, drums clattering in time.

Despite knowing that one of their own was missing, the band marched on.

Its performance on the drizzly streets of South Los Angeles was the band’s first since drummer and friend Eron Mull, 18, was gunned down in a gang-related crossfire outside a Hollywood nightclub Jan. 12.

King holiday events honor the civil rights leader’s life, but the fact that he was assassinated is inescapable. That blend of celebration and sadness was embodied by the Crenshaw Cougars and others who took part in the parade Monday.

The rapping Omega Psi Phi fraternity won cheers, and little children who, in uniforms and plumed hats, looked like toy soldiers drew smiles from the onlookers.

But with their spirited performance, the Cougars commemorated another life cut short.

“Last week was pretty dismal,” band director Al Tarver said. The band members, Tarver said, “used this parade to air some of that grief.”

Mull graduated last year, but had been taking community college classes and volunteering with the band’s percussion section as a snare drummer.. Mull had planned to enroll in college in the fall.

Honoring the memory of that young man, his friends said, pushed them to play their hearts out on the about 2.5-mile route.

“It’s kind of like we’re doing this for Eron,” said Douglas Bermudez, 17, a senior, as he loaded his bass drum in a school bus after the parade.

By then the sun had come out, chasing umbrellas away, and most of the vendors who were hawking towers of pastel cotton candy and inflatable toys to the more than 5,000 people who were lining the parade route had disappeared.

For Bermudez the annual Kingdom Day parade was old hat. But two parents who were milling among the drill team dancers and custom bicycle riders at the end of the route in Leimert Park were giddy with pride at their sons’ parade debut.

“My heart started beating so fast,” said Liz Lima, when she saw the two teenage boys in her family, Oscar Ortiz and Alejandro Macias Jr., strut by. “I was so proud of them!”

She and her husband, Alejandro Macias, battled the crowd for three hours, chasing the Samuel Gompers Middle School Bulldogs along the parade route with a video camera. The politicians in convertibles, the clopping Budweiser Clydesdales and bass-thumping radio station floats rolling by had nothing on her sons, one banging a snare drum, the other carrying a school banner.

The boys, Lima said, had learned about King’s legacy in school. But, she said, “I’m pretty sure after today they’ll have something to remember.”

Two-year-old Mekhi Allen wasn’t quite ready for a drum kit, perched as he was atop his father’s shoulders and clutching an inflatable Spider-Man as an oversized Dodgers cap shielded him from the late-morning rain.

In spite of the chilly, gray weather, the toddler’s parents were determined that Mekhi see his first parade.

“He needs to know about his past,” said his father, Damil Coleman, 35, of Long Beach.

The diverse throngs that were bunched six-deep along the curbs of Martin Luther King Jr. and Crenshaw boulevards, Coleman said, illustrated King’s legacy.

“You got a little bit of everybody out today: black, Hispanic, everybody. That’s how it should be. I hope everybody can see how everybody can get along,” Coleman said. “It just doesn’t have to be only for a parade.”

Tarver echoed what he saw as a chance to spread an optimistic message, even as his young band members remained shaken by Mull’s death.

“He was just out with a friend in the wrong place,” Tarver said.

The parade was “important for people of color, because of what Martin Luther King stood for,” Tarver said. “It’s important for us to participate -- for people to see South Central in a positive light.”

One of Mull’s fellow snare drummers, JaRell Jacobs, 17, felt privileged to help keep King’s dream alive Monday.

But just as significant, he said, was paying his respects to a fallen friend.

The drum section of the Crenshaw band will don their electric blue-and-gold uniforms once more for a farewell performance at Mull’s memorial service today.

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susannah.rosenblatt@latimes.com