King Events Focus on Youths

Warner Rogers vividly recalls the segregated fountains and bathrooms of his youth in Texas, and he turned out Monday to honor a man whose fervent oratory and nonviolent protest helped alter that social landscape.

“A lot of things changed because of the Rev. Martin Luther King,” said Rogers, 61, as he cheered the passing bands and dignitaries at the 19th annual Kingdom Day parade in South Los Angeles.

Rogers had his 5-year-old son, Dar-Quan, in tow because “our young have always been in our struggles.... They have to know about this.”

Dar-Quan was thrilled to be there -- especially once he saw the clowns.

Throughout California, families spanning generations spent a balmy day remembering the martyred civil rights leader, who would have turned 75 last Thursday, and focusing on ways to keep his spirit of activism alive. In San Francisco, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a speech invoking King’s legacy.

In Los Angeles, more than 100,000 spectators, police said, filled sidewalks along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to watch Mayor James K. Hahn, City Council members, state legislators, celebrities and dozens of dance performers, martial arts groups and student groups from various cultural backgrounds. The theme of the parade, which stretched to nearly four hours, was “Living the Challenge of King’s Dream.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) chose to walk the 20-block-long parade route -- in black patent-leather heels.

Not far away, about 200 people, mostly families and teenagers, gathered in a parking lot outside the Coliseum in South Los Angeles for a peace rally and fundraiser organized by the 100,000 Man March, a local nonprofit organization that works to support community youth programs.

“We do this for the young people who don’t know themselves, who believe in cars and jewelry instead of in themselves,” said Bo Taylor, head of a local youth intervention program called Unity 1.

Daude Sherrills, an event organizer and a founder of the 100,000 Man March organization, said he wanted to inspire a new generation of peace activists to follow in King’s footsteps.

“We haven’t had a major civil rights movement, a major peace movement, since the assassination of Martin Luther King,” Sherrills said. “So we want to have a movement of the people, by the people and for the people, for peace.”

Sherrills’ nephew, Terrill Sherrills, was shot and killed at a party on Jan. 10 in Ladera Heights. His grandmother, Wajeha Bilal, said she hoped the event would open the eyes of youngsters to the ongoing problem of gang violence.

At the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, about 300 people, including Riverside middle school students, families from La Canada Flintridge and social workers, attended a morning program on community service and social action.

Sporting stickers that read, “A Day On ... Not a Day Off,” participants heard Liebe Geft, the museum’s director, praise King because he “slew the dragon of Jim Crow with the sword of nonviolent protest.”

James Hurd, a professor of music at El Camino College, steered the audience through a brief pictorial history of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school-integration case that was decided 50 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hurd, an organist, told of growing up in an integrated neighborhood in Topeka, Kan., where children of many races played together in the streets but were separated for schooling. He went to Monroe Elementary School, the same school for African Americans that young Linda Brown, the daughter of a minister, attended before she became a test case for integration.

Kylee Magby, 13, a seventh-grader from University Heights Middle School in Riverside, said she was “glad to be here,” even though she had to rise before 7 a.m. and take a long bus ride on a school holiday.

Magby said she was already well aware of King’s legacy. “He spoke out for other people,” she said, adding that she had answered the call to social action by working at a soup kitchen and volunteering at her school.

At the Second Baptist Church of Santa Ana, documentary footage of King, who was slain in 1968, played on two large screens above the choir. Speaker after speaker urged those present to keep King’s message pertinent.

“When we forget where we came from and get comfortable with where we are, we are already dead,” said Lake Forest City Councilwoman Kathryn McCullough, who became Orange County’s first black mayor four years ago. “What have you done today to make a difference?” she challenged the mostly black crowd. “Not yesterday. Yesterday is history. Not tomorrow. You don’t know if you will be here tomorrow. What have you done today?”

In San Francisco, Schwarzenegger devoted much of a 4 1/2-minute speech to an anecdote about his fourth-grade son, Patrick, 10.

For the last two weeks, Schwarzenegger said, he and Patrick each night have been reading “Marching to Freedom: The Story of Martin Luther King Jr.,” a biography by Joyce Milton.

“He’s fascinated by this book, and he’s fascinated by Dr. King’s story. It’s the only book, other than those about athletes, that Maria [Shriver] and I have been able to get him to read,” Schwarzenegger said.

“Every so often, he will ask me a question, a very interesting question, like, ‘Daddy, why couldn’t that black girl go to school?’ Or he will ask, ‘Daddy, what does it mean that black people couldn’t sit with white people in the restaurant?’ And even while he learns in class about segregation, Dr. King brings it to life for him. He’s learning the meaning of Dr. King. To a little fourth-grade boy who loves to swim, it means something when he reads that Albany, Ga., closed its swimming pool rather than let black kids swim in there. So he’s learning about the atmosphere of those days, about how Dr. King was a force for change and a force for justice....

“You know something? Reading the child’s biography has been a great experience for me, too. It is important once in a while to see the world through the eyes of a child. To see that innocence and to see that shock at injustice.”

Times staff writers Joe Mathews in San Francisco, Daniel Yi in Orange County and Allison Hoffman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.