King Day Messages Emphasize Lessons, Continuing Struggle

As Martin Luther King Day approaches each year, Gloria Banks’ phone rings with calls from students looking for someone to speak on the civil rights movement.

“I ask them, ‘Have you talked to your parents?’ ” Banks, president of the Orange County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, told nearly 500 people gathered Monday at the Second Baptist Church of Santa Ana.

The kids tell Banks that their parents are too young to remember, she said. “Don’t you have some old folks at NAACP?” she said they ask.

The story elicited laughter from the pews, but Banks’ message was clear. “Did you forget you too have a legacy to carry on?” she asked the crowd.

The gathering at Second Baptist, Orange County’s oldest African American church, was one of numerous Southland events commemorating the life of the slain civil rights leader, who would have turned 75 last Thursday.

In south Los Angeles, more than 100,000 spectators filled sidewalks along Crenshaw Boulevard to watch the 19th annual Kingdom Day Parade.

At L.A.’s Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Plaza, about 300 people -- including middle school students from Riverside, families from La Canada Flintridge and Los Angeles social workers -- attended a program on community service and social action.

And in San Francisco, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger devoted much of a 4 1/2-minute speech to an anecdote about his reading “Marching to Freedom: The Story of Martin Luther King Jr.,” to Schwarzenegger’s fourth-grade son, Patrick, 10.

At Second Baptist in Santa Ana, the event was in equal measure celebration, religious service and wake-up call.

King’s dream of an equal and just society is “just that,” said Pastor Mike Barta of the Johnson Chapel AME Church in Santa Ana.

“It is still a dream.”

As documentary footage of the civil rights movement played on two large screens over the choir at Second Baptist, speaker after speaker urged parishioners to keep King’s message pertinent today.

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

Second Baptist’s pastor, John McReynolds, said it’s perhaps easier to become complacent in Orange County because of its suburban setting and relative wealth.

“Many of us have chosen to close that chapter [the 1960s civil rights struggle] and forget,” McReynolds said after the service. “They think, ‘I can buy a house in Lake Forest. I can live in Aliso Viejo.... I have arrived, I have achieved.’ But it is more than just that.”

Many in this country still don’t have health insurance, McReynolds said. Millions are unemployed, and schools are underfunded. The fight for social justice, he said, should be a constant in people’s minds -- not just a chapter in history.

Times staff writer Martha Groves contributed to this report.