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MLK memorial service is wake up call
YOUNGSTOWN
Forty-nine years after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the keynote speaker at a local memorial observance exhorted the audience to keep the memory of the slain civil-rights leader alive by speaking out on social justice issues.
The Tuesday occasion was the annual memorial service for the iconic leader in the Mahoning County Courthouse rotunda, which was sponsored by the Baptist Pastors’ Council of Youngstown and Vicinity.
Dr. King was slain April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.
“Wake up. Get up. Speak up,” the Rev. Gena Thornton of Youngstown, former pastor of Grace AME Church in Warren, urged the audience, which included many clergy and Youngstown and Mahoning County officials.
“When I heard the news that Dr. King had been shot, something touched me on this shoulder, and I heard a voice say: ‘Wake up,’” she recalled of that evening 49 years ago.
It’s necessary to continue to speak out today against injustice and prejudice that’s based on race and gender and “all of the things that separate humanity,” she added.
After her speech, the Rev. Kenneth L. Simon, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, quoted Dr. King’s observation that: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Noting Dr. King’s staunch advocacy of voting rights, the Rev. Mr. Simon reminded his audience early voting started Tuesday and ends May 1, with the primary May 2.
“Make sure that everyone who’s registered to vote takes advantage of this awesome privilege and citizenship responsibility that we have to vote,” he urged the audience.
Also at the memorial service, Testament of Hope college scholarship awards to Youngstown-area students were announced by Pastor Ernest Ellis of Antioch Baptist Church, moderator of the Eastern Ohio Baptist Association.
The scholarship recipients are Kemarra Boyd, Rae’ven Crum, Rachel M. Crum and Suniterra Dudley.
The event began with participants singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the black American national anthem by James Weldon Johnson, and ended with them linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.