It was time for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday program, which was running a little over schedule at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, to morph into the planned inauguration watch party. So one of the officials announced they would forgo the program’s traditional close, the singing of We Shall Overcome, a rallying cry of the Civil Rights movement.
She could not overcome the objections of the crowd. Shouts of “no” in the full 2,000-seat sanctuary drowned out the speaker.
They did not want to forgo a song that symbolized the movement the Rev. King Martin Luther King Jr. led even if it meant missing the first moments of ceremonial second term inauguration of the first African American president.
Though it was not also performed in Spanish, Hebrew or Italian as planned, as thousands had done at the end of the previous 44 King Day celebrations, folks held hands and swayed and sang.
Then it was time for the inauguration watch party.
Celebrations of the 45th edition of the national holiday in honor of the life and work of Atlanta’s Nobel Prize winning native son, who would have turned 84 last week, were held throughout metro. Among them were a ceremony hosted by the Cobb County NAACP and county government; a day of service sponsored by the Clarkston Community Center; and a parade ending in a rally sponsored by the DeKalb NAACP at King’s namesake high school.
Among those present for the dual celebrations at Ebenezer were the Garrett family who drove in from Monroe. “I want them to understand the importance of what Dr. King did,” said Danielle Garrett who, along with her husband Christopher, had brought their teenage daughter, two younger sons and two granddaughters to the center for the day.
The younger ones weren’t sure of the significance of the day but Garrett was confident they would understand by the time the holiday events were over.
Speaker after speaker reminded the Atlanta celebrants that even as the first African American president was beginning his second term, injustices remain almost 50 years after the Civil Rights Act became law.
“The movement is not over,” said Elizabeth Omilami, whose father Hosea Williams who was often sent into cities and towns in advance of King during the Civil Rights Movement to energize the community. “It’s been revitalized.”
Reflecting the style of her father to downplay his significance in the movement and deflect to the King family, Omilami entertained with humor even as she spoke of work still undone.
A clinic run by the organization her late father started provides medicine and clothing and feeds about 61,000 a year and that is not enough, Omilami said.
“If we loved each other, I wouldn’t have to … see a child that didn’t eat from a free lunch on Friday to a free lunch on Monday,” Omilami said.
Guns were also a topic during the program.
“Dr. King was a victim of gun violence,” Omilami said, recalling that King was shot dead while standing on a second-floor walkway outside a Memphis motel room in 1968.
The Rev. Bernice King, the youngest of MLK’s four children and now CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, recalled the night when her father confronted armed and angry neighbors who wanted to fight violence with violence and tied it to street violence today
She said her father told the crowd “‘we can’t fight this with guns. Put your guns up. We are gong to a higher place. We are going to fight this with peace.’”
Political rancor, natural disasters, damage to the environment, “military conflicts all over the world, mass shootings that show even our most precious children are not safe,” King said.
“We must go back and listen to the voice of Martin Luther King. We must rid ourselves of poverty,” she said. “We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish as fools.”
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