It’s been 41 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but only for the last three years – since 2006 – have all 50 states celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
STATEWIDE – It’s been 41 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but only for the last three years – since 2006 – have all 50 states celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
It falls on the third Monday in January, to commemorate the Jan. 15, 1929, birthdate of the civil rights leader perhaps best known for his “I have a dream …” speech.
Gregory Coates, pastor of The Way Bible Church in Central City, a new church plant in the Baton Rouge Area Baptist Association, was one of many pastors across Louisiana to talk about the importance of remembering Dr. King.
“For me it’s that we would remember the actual dream itself,” Coates said. “I think too many people in this country have forgotten that the dream was about us coming together as Americans and forgetting about races.”
A.B. Lartigue, pastor of Unity Baptist Church in Lake Charles, remembered being “two or three seats” away from Dr. King at a rally in Rochester, N.Y., in 1957 or ’58, when Lartigue was a college student and a minister.
“When they said he was coming I was able to get in there and the pastor at this church knew me, knew I was a minister, so they put me on the stage too,” Lartigue explained. “There are so many things he did for everybody; it wasn’t a one-sided thing. …
“‘I have a dream that one day we will join hands together.’ I still have that speech. I got it out of Jet [magazine] and put it in my Bible,” Lartigue continued. ‘One day the races of people would come together for a great cause,’ [Dr. King said.] We’re one blood and we should love one another. In my family, my great-great-grandfather was a white Italian, and my great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian. Our blood, it might be O-positive or B-negative, but it’s all human blood.”
Members of New Zion Baptist Church in Bossier City participated in that city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, both by walking in it and by riding the church van in it.
Remembering and honoring Dr. King’s life are important because of the civil rights leader’s bedrock biblical principles, said Pastor Philip Williamson.
“He stood for equality among all people,” Williamson said. “And not only equality, but also the whole way we go about it: the non-violence. … His agenda of equality without violence, that appealed to me [in the 1950s and ‘60s] as a Christian and someone who wanted equality, but that when we achieved it, that we can all still be around to see it; that’s key to me.”
Plymouth Rock Baptist Church in Plaquemine, where Lee Wesley is pastor (he’s also pastor of Community Bible Baptist Church in Baton Rouge) sponsors an annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. This year’s event is to include an Oratorio contest for students, with “Martin’s Dream, Our Reality” as its theme.
“We thought this was an appropriate theme in view of the historical nature of where we are – about to inaugurate the first African American president of the United States,” Wesley said. “Dr. King’s work – along with others, of course – changed the course of history in this nation.
“He was a moral voice, moral conscience and helped get us on the right track, and helped us understand we are all brothers and sisters,” the pastor continued. “If we discontinue to celebrate that, the young people following after us will not understand how we got where we are as a people and a nation.”
Six million signatures were collected in the late 1970s and early ‘80s for a petition to Congress to pass a law for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
A 2006 article in The Nation magazine reported it was “the largest petition in favor of an issue in U.S. history.”
Ronald Reagan, then-president of the United States, signed the bill into law 15 years after Dr. King’s death in 1968, marking the third Monday in January – starting in 1986 – as a national holiday to honor the civil rights leader.
“The reason his movement moved people, gained strength and is alive today is that he knew … there can only be one King, one King of kings,” said E. Edwards Jones Sr., pastor of Galilee Baptist Church in Shreveport. “We have a challenge to tell a dying, crying world that we have someone who can help them. … That’s the story we’ve got to tell in our local settings.”