Rock Hill celebrates MLK Day with call to love, go beyond myths, focus on message
A holiday program brought them to church, an award-winning community activist kept them there and a challenge went with them as they left.
Hundreds gathered Monday morning for the 16th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Prayer Breakfast at First Baptist Church Rock Hill. Guests included blacks and whites, elected officials and community organizers, pastors, public servants, teachers and essay contest winners.
The event was both a celebration and call to action.
“If America is going to be great, then not only must it let go of the fiction, the myth of MLK, it must relinquish its own myths about what it was in the past and what it is today,” said Winthrop University professor and keynote speaker Dr. Adolphus Belk Jr.
Belk, who studies and teaches on race and ethnic politics, crime and punishment, told the communitywide crowd he isn’t the typical program speaker. He asked organizers if they were sure they wanted to hear what he had to say. Belk then told the crowd the way to honor King’s vision for this country starts with recognizing who the man was, and wasn’t.
He wasn’t fearless, passive or colorblind. King was, Belk said, a mix of profound and profane.
“People talk about him as if he’s a saint,” Belk said. “As if he is a saint. And I’m not saying these things to diminish his stature but to make him real to us. Because when we lift someone up that high, it seems almost impossible for us to learn from them, or to follow their advantage.”
Getting beyond the myth gets to the message, he said, which puts a clearer focus on where race relations are today.
“The objective back then was rather straightforward — freedom, justice, equality and peace,” Belk said. “The current situation? African-Americans and others who are maligned in society find themselves at the corner of progress and peril on a number of measures.”
Black people have advanced in many areas since King’s time, Belk said, but still make less money than white counterparts, with the margen widening. Black people live in poverty at higher rates than the general population and have children more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were decades ago.
“America is still a largely segregated society,” Belk said. “And schools today are as segregated as they were in 1968, the year that King was murdered.”
School demographics are impacted heavily by housing, he said, as are health statistics and wealth disparity. White people who own homes have net worths, on average, several times higher than black homeowners. Systemic biases are to blame, Belk said, as they are for the erosion of voting rights and incidents of police brutality.
“The nation’s best law enforcement officers — some of them in this room — honor the badges and the uniforms that they wear,” he said. “They take their charge seriously, they protect and serve. The worst, however, full of passion and intensity, defile them.”
Belk challenged the community to come to terms with where we are as a society. At the same time, several people spoke of efforts in Rock Hill to become the type of inclusive community people had gathered to celebrate.
Rev. C.T. Kirk, pastor at Sanctuary of Life Outreach Center, received the Dream Keeper Award for numerous efforts to educate children, serve the homeless, organize or participate in unity and anti-violence rallies.
Kirk said the reason he serves his community is bigger than politics or so many of the issues that divide people.
“I’m so glad that God is not racist, sexist,” Kirk said. “He’s not Democrat or Republican. He’s just God Almighty Himself.”
There are public efforts, too, aimed at improving the lives of all people in Rock Hill. As of the end of last year, every city job pays a living wage. Within a few months, Rock Hill will launch its free bus service serving much of the downtown area.
Mayor John Gettys said he believes that service is in place “so people have opportunities to make opportunities.”
Getty’s looked to King’s own words as template for the city.
“You need a heart full of grace, and a soul generated by love,” Gettys said. “That’s what he said. And that’s what we strive to do in this community.”
While it’s unlikely anyone in the audience will cure cancer, end world hunger or negotiate world peace, Gettys said he believes it doesn’t take something on that scale to make a difference.
“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve,” Gettys said.
Rev. Steve Hogg, pastor at First Baptist, said getting together on a Monday morning in Janurary, as the interfaith group has for more than a decade, is an important part of working toward the community Rock Hill wants to be.
“You have those moments that cause you to just look inside, reflect, become a better person,” he said. “That’s what this does for me.”
And, Hogg said, he isn’t alone.
“I don’t think there’s any way to measure how much better we are as a community because for 16 years we’ve been coming together,” he said.
