MLK march: Older generation helps walk children through history (+video)

Saturday’s Martin Luther King celebrations started off with the flipping of cat-shaped pancakes onto Styrofoam plates.

Jason Edwards ate with his wife and two children in the basement of the Christian Faith Centre, 1130 S. Broadway. Edwards used to attend the Faith Centre but now leads Street Hustlaz Ministries, where he feeds more than 100 people on normal Saturdays, he said.

“Who’s Martin Luther King?” his step-daughter, Shey Goins, asked.

“You know,” said Lisa Edwards, his wife. “What is he to you?”

“He’s the guy who is dead,” Shey said.

“He’s the guy who is for peace,” said her brother, Michael.

The Rev. Wade Moore read a Martin Luther King children’s book to the crowd of about 150, mostly women and children.

“Martin said ‘love’ when others said ‘hate,’ ” Moore read. “He said ‘together’ when others said ‘separate.’ ”

Shey said she learned about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation at Gardiner Elementary, where she attends a fourth-grade class with four black kids, three Latinos and 19 white kids (a classroom that would, with an Asian and a couple more Latinos, mirror the racial makeup of the city as a whole).

As Moore continued the story, he read about bombs exploding, 340 years of slavery and the “whites only” signs that King helped bring down. King then tried to help garbage collectors in Memphis escape poverty, and was shot and killed, Moore read.

“But his big words are alive for us today,” Moore said to great applause. Shey, watching her parents, started clapping, too. “You can be anything you want to be. You can be president of United States. … If (King) had lived, he would’ve been president.”

Moore helped revitalize the Martin Luther King celebrations in town when he started Christian Faith Centre in 2002 and has in recent years added special classes for children about King.

After the high school students were dismissed to their classroom, Larry Bell walked in and told them to move to the front of the class. “Martin didn’t want to sit in the back,” he said, and they moved up.

The high-schoolers listed off their dreams. The two boys wanted to be scientists: a mechanical engineer and a biochemist, they said. The girls’ dreams were more varied: singer, social worker, nurse, pediatrician, plastic surgeon and doctor.

In the pre-K and kindergarten class, Carol Pete told a story about Horton Luther King, an imaginary black man who gets to go to his factory job every day because of everything done by King.

“I. Have. A. Dream,” Pete made them repeat slowly, when none of the children could name King’s famous speech.

In the middle school room, a girl sat on a desk and chatted to her three friends while the teacher diagrammed “Martin Luther King” and “resistance” bubbles on the board.

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In the basement, Mark McCormick, director of the Kansas African American Museum, and Ted Ayres, the director of community engagement at Wichita State University, talked about how amazing it was that Wichita State has the largest collection of photography by Gordon Parks. Parks, a native Kansan, is credited with being the first major black filmmaker in the U.S. and a pioneer for black photographers.

McCormick disagreed that King would have been president if he had survived his assassination in 1968. “He’s been reduced to someone who marched and spoke well,” McCormick said. “When he died he had a 75 percent disapproval rate, a 55 percent disapproval rate among African-Americans. … When you speak for the poor, you become a dangerous person.”

‘Dream Big’

As people lined up for the day’s march outside, Shey held up the poster she had made in class: It looked like an upside-down American flag, with an excerpt of the “I Have a Dream” speech and the words “Dream Big.”

They marched from the church on South Broadway to Chester Lewis Reflection Square on East Douglas.

Snowflakes had started to flutter when a large contingent of QuikTrip workers showed up in red jackets, multiplying the number of white marchers several times over, as well as the number of dogs and kids pulled in wagons. One QuikTrip worker’s son handed out coupons for breakfast pizza.

“Thank you for coming out, T-Mobile,” said City Council member Lavonta Williams, as workers from the only other company with a visible presence in the march passed her by. One of the T-Mobile workers shared a video of herself marching to 100 followers on Snapchat, a social media app.

The night before, Williams had called the police, she said, and asked that they send more officers to help with Saturday’s march traffic. There had been a mix-up and no one had obtained a parade permit this year. Moore had put a positive spin on it that morning, saying that King didn’t parade anyway, he marched.

Besides a handful of ROTC students from Derby High School, about 20 elementary students from Moore’s private Urban Preparatory Academy provided the most visible school presence. The Academy has 39 black and mixed-race children in its second year, according to Madelene Moore, one of the teachers.

The Pink Diamonds, a group of about 20 girls age 8 to 17 wearing pink tops, stopped to dance in several parking lots along Broadway and Douglas.

Zumar Griffith and Mariah Maryman, 13, were the final two marchers to arrive at Chester Lewis Reflection Square, a small park at 205 E. Douglas. It was Griffith’s first time marching, she said, though she’d watched from the side in the past. After decades of watching, she decided it was finally time to participate.

Shey’s mom took a photo of her sitting at the bronze counter that commemorates the Dockum Drug Store sit-in. Darius Smith, 53, who took photos throughout the march, said his mother, Joan Williams, was part of the original Dockum sit-in as a teenager.

By the time the Pink Diamonds had danced their final dance and Moore and Williams gave their final speeches, about half of the 500 or so marchers had already left.

“We can never forget what it took for us to stand here together,” Moore said, as one girl held her shivering sister close and another girl held a poster with her teeth.

Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichitan and the first African-American woman to serve in the Kansas Senate, said she is hopeful for the future: “My hope is one day we don’t have to do marches to address the injustices of people.”

This story was originally published January 16, 2016 at 7:36 PM with the headline "MLK march: Older generation helps walk children through history (+video)."