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WILKES-BARRE — Members of the community honored the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with song and dance at King’s College on Monday as attendees of the event commemorating the birthday of the slain civil rights leader were asked to consider the question — “Can the dream become a reality?”
Guests who filed into the Snyder and Walsh rooms of the Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center for the 11 a.m. event were given colorful freedom bells as they entered and were encouraged to ring them and clap throughout the event.
Jasmine Tabron, director of multicultural international student programs for King’s, said it was her second time organizing the longstanding annual event at the college.
Tabron explained the purpose of the event is to honor King and his legacy, as well as to see if society is living out his dream today.
Members of the King’s College Gospel Choir and Mount Zion’s Youth Choir and Praise Dancers also sang at the event. Attendees cheered in approval, and some rang their freedom bells and clapped along with the tune.
Cyrus Solomon, 48, brought his children, King, 3, and Empress, 4. They sat in the crowd as Cyrus’ wife, Tonya, sang with the Mount Zion Choir.
Solomon was pleased with the event.
“I thought it was impactful,” he said. “It was more than I expected.”
Speakers at the event included Ibrahim Almecky, president of the Islamic Association of NEPA, Rabbi Roger Lerner of Temple B’nai B’rith of Kingston, and the Rev. Stephen Chase Pepper of the Campus Ministry of King’s College.
Tabron hoped that bringing speakers of different faiths together would inspire others that coexistence is possible.
Solomon said each of the speakers made him think and reconsider different vantage points about where society is today. Solomon believed that today, more coexistence and understanding is needed.
“Truth speaking takes truth hearing,” he said. “I think that sometimes if we’re going to make changes, we have to be able to speak the truth.”
Solomon also noted that there has to be more understanding among people.
King’s message, Tabron believed, is just as crucial today as it was when King first gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“You can always learn from your past,” she said. “It’s good to make sure we’re living out what he wanted, and not just what he wanted, but moreso, it was better for mankind.”
Later in the day, Renee Suchoski attended a MLK Day Celebration at the Sherman Hills apartment complex in Wilkes-Barre. Her son, John, spoke at the program and pointed out that his mother attended King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963.
“My grandmother took us, my cousins and I,” Suchoski said. At the time she was 8 or 9, she recollected, and didn’t want to go because it was a hot summer day.
“Now I see the significance as an adult, but as a child you didn’t see it,” she said. When the Wilkes-Barre chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ran a bus trip to the 30th anniversary celebration of the speech, she took her daughter, she said.
Her son has been pushing Wilkes-Barre to honor the national holiday by closing City Hall for the day. He held up a poster of King with attachments taped to it. One read, “Coming 2017? No.” The other asked, “Coming 2018?”
“I’m just asking all our city officials to work together to try and make it happen next year,” he said.
Wilkes-Barre officials held City Hall for a Day at Sherman Hills as an outreach program at the complex that’s home to many low-income residents.
U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Moosic, whose legislative district includes the city, said it’s still a struggle to carry out King’s message.
“We face two enemies in today’s fight: minds still closed to Dr. King’s principles and some minds that have unfortunately become complacent to Dr. King’s principles,” Cartwright said.
He mentioned the ongoing fight between U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a longtime advocate of civil rights who was beaten more than 50 years ago in the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and President-elect Donald Trump. Cartwright said he accompanied Lewis to a 50th anniversary ceremony of the March 7, 1965, march.
Cartwright shared his opinion on why Trump was elected and why he won in Luzerne County.
“Did people around here vote for him because of the bigoted, because of the backward, because of the racist, because of the sexist things that came out of his mouth over the last year or so? I don’t think so,” Cartwright said.
“I think the truth is people around here are hurting and what Donald Trump offered them was change. And I don’t think they are bigoted and racist and sexist around here.”
He urged the nearly 50 people in attendance, many of them city employees, to act upon the question King posed that was featured on the front of the program, ” Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for other?’”
“We need to take up that challenge,” Cartwright said. “We need to come together to do our part and help those people too.”
