Struggles and Dreams Marked in Orange County

Like many others filing into the high school auditorium in Santa Ana, Pryce Brooks had to take a day off from work to pay homage to the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But it was worth spending a day of vacation to attend Orange County’s King celebration, Brooks said, because the new holiday is important. Five of his children--all born since the civil rights leader’s death in 1968--listened as he spoke. The holiday, Brooks said, recognizes “the struggle we’re in and the struggle we’ve been through. He (King) was a great leader to both blacks and whites. We haven’t had that many great leaders these days.”

That feeling--a celebration of hard-won civil rights and a resolve to pass along the commitment to future generations--was expressed in rousing song, prayer and speeches at Valley High School, where about 1,400 gathered to commemorate King’s birthday.

“Now that all the cotton is picked . . . now that all the seats on the bus are ours, now that all the department stores are open to us, now we, too, must leave some stones of hope behind,” the Rev. John Nix McReynolds told the crowd in the nearly packed auditorium.

The holiday is a happy celebration because the years of Jim Crow oppression and “violent uproar” are in the past, said McReynolds, senior pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Santa Ana. “May we never forget yesterday. But may we never confuse movement and progress,” he said to the cheers and applause of the audience.

The largely religious and musical ceremony, “Our Commitment to Living the Dream,” was sponsored by the Interdenominational Ministers’ Alliance of Orange County and the local branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

In Los Angeles, the spirit of pride flowed down more than three miles of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on Monday as 100 black community organizations threw the city’s first Kingdom Day Parade, a joyful observance of the new federal holiday honoring King’s birthday.

The parade, a sprawling mixture of spiritual, commercial and civic entries, meandered for four hours past thousands of bystanders, virtually all of them black. Starting near the Memorial Coliseum, it passed the crumbling storefronts and Victorian homes of Southwest Los Angeles, the neatly trimmed lawns of the Crenshaw district and ended in the suburban comfort of Baldwin Hills with a rally in a stadium named after the late Jackie Robinson, the pioneering black baseball player.

Shouts of ‘Happy Birthday’

The day’s most common greeting--”Happy Birthday”--was shouted enthusiastically by parade participants, who rode in cars, buses, motorcycles and replicas of churches and ships or marched as drill teams or bands or tambourine-banging members of congregations. King buttons, T-shirts, posters and poems were hawked up and down the street.

The Orange County celebration confined to the high school auditorium in Santa Ana at times resembled a community church service as audience members, wearing their Sunday best, often punctuated the 200-voice choir’s gospel singing and ministers’ prayers with spontaneous shouts of “Amen” and “Hallelujah!”

Red flowers framed by green ferns and leaves decorated the stage, and the choir was dressed in red, green and black, the colors of the black liberation movement.

“We have come a long way,” James Colquitt, president of the NAACP Orange County chapter, told the crowd. “But it still concerns us in Orange County that we have empty seats in this building,” he said, referring to about 100 unoccupied chairs. “It concerns us that some believe this holiday was a black holiday. But Dr. King knew better. He knew that these concerns were for all people of all races, creeds and color.”

The turnout “is the first time in several years that a visible, viable black presence has been noticed in Orange County,” the Rev. Russell Thomas Hill Jr., senior pastor, Johnson Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Santa Ana, said after the 2 1/2-hour program. “For the first time in years, we have said: ‘We are here.’ ”

Only a few whites attended the ceremony, for which Hill took responsibility, saying that in planning Orange County’s first Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration the organizers looked to their own congregations and members and “didn’t appeal to others.”

Like Brooks, printer Joseph Harris, 33, of Corona had to take a day of vacation to celebrate King’s birthday. The ceremony left him with a feeling of togetherness and brotherhood; his 10-year-old daughter, Ricke, said she felt “joy and happiness” after the songs and prayers.

Wrong Perception

But Harris added that King’s birthday is being wrongly perceived as a black holiday.

“If it were not perceived as a black holiday, more people would have had it off,” he said.

“He thought of people as people, like God does, not as black or white or red, but as people,” said Jackie Clark of Riverside, who had to take a day of vacation from her job at Hughes Aircraft in Newport Beach to attend. The holiday is important, she said, “because it’s important to remember what was done and to keep trying to do what he (King) did, to keep it going.”

In his speech, NAACP chapter president Colquitt extolled King’s fight for equality but added that there is “still subtle institutionalized discrimination.” He lauded Irvine and Huntington Beach, the only two Orange County cities that “leaped ahead” and recognized the holiday.

He added that the black community will work to end the discontent, “implications and innuendoes” that occurred in Santa Ana, referring to the last-minute cancellation of protest plans by a black coalition because Santa Ana refused to close its city offices for the holiday. (As a compromise to the angered coalition, led by Hill, the city allowed employees to attend the King celebration on paid leave.)

Most Schools Closed

Most of Orange County’s 28 school districts had no classes Monday and observed the day as an official holiday. Among the exceptions was Laguna Beach Unified School District, where some schools, including Laguna Beach High, were open.

About 15 students protested in front of the high school on Monday morning; they said the school system should observe the holiday. (Laguna Beach Unified officials said the intermediate school closed Monday, not for the holiday but for “in-service” training of staff.)

For about the last five years, Laguna Beach Unified has observed a special weeklong holiday in February officially called “the mid-winter break” but unofficially called “the ski break.” School system officials said the break was started to try to cut down on student ski absences in late January and February. The school district combined its observances of Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday into the week, and this year the district also was given permission by state school officials to observe King’s birthday during the mid-winter break, which is Feb. 10-14.

Student protesters at the high school said they thought the slain civil rights leader deserved better recognition than to be included during a ski-break weekend.

Six of Orange County’s eight community colleges held classes as usual on the holiday. The two community colleges observing the holiday with no classes were Saddleback and Irvine Valley, both in the Saddleback Community College District.

Chapman College Open

Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine, both state public universities, were closed Monday, but Chapman College in Orange, a private four-year institution, was open.

“Fifty-seven years ago, God saw fit to bring into this world a prophet,” Hill told the crowd celebrating King’s birthday at Valley High School. The struggle for equality is centuries old and will continue, he said, calling on King’s words, “until people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

McReynolds told the gathering that blacks have a responsibility to use the freedom for which King fought so hard to improve themselves and their community, and to inspire generations to come.

“There was a time when there were those who loved to blame the white man,” he said. King and other civil rights leaders fought against the laws and institutions that kept blacks from being free and “left us an embryonic instinct for freedom, a legacy of hope for the future,” McReynolds said. But now, he said, the black community must follow King’s example and leave new dreams for the generations that follow.

“Our Afros . . . our rock idioms . . . our borderline illiteracy--will these be the stones we will leave behind?” McReynolds asked the audience. He challenged members of the crowd to be “the best you can be,” commit themselves to God and leave “stones of hope in an age of crises and uncertainty.”

The ceremony opened and closed with the black equality movement’s theme, “We Shall Overcome.”

“It left me with a feeling of togetherness and love and peace,” said Dorothy Clark of Santa Ana.

“The spirit is still carrying on. It’s not dead,” said the Rev. Raymond L. Massey of the Community Temple Interdenominational Church of Santa Ana. “Because he (King) did so much, we feel inspired to continue.”