MLK Day Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

A FINE DAY FOR PEOPLE-WATCHING, SIGN-READING . . . & REMEMBERING

Marchers gathering on a sunshiny San Francisco morning (Author photo)

Walking shoes? Check. Sunglasses? Check. Enthusiasm? Check.

The annual Martin Luther King Day San Francisco celebration kicked off on a balmy holiday morning with a walk of a mile or so ending at downtown’s Yerba Buena Gardens, site of the city’s waterfall memorial to King. (Speeches, music, politicians, Check . . .) The march commemorates the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march; that one, though, was 54 miles.

(Author photo)

Sign-spotting was almost as much fun as running into old friends among the several thousand walkers. The sign above, waved with gusto by a four-year-old getting a free lift in his dad’s wagon, features an MLK quote, “The time is always right for doing what is right.”

Many of my favorites were on the T-shirts of young walkers, or piggy-back riders like this one testing the strength of another energetic dad (below.)

(Author Photo)

The event, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Interfaith Council for several decades, was held for the first time post-pandemic last year, but this year’s celebration brought out enthusiastic crowds and voices reminiscent of earlier, multi-thousand-crowd days.

MLK Day became a national holiday in 1986, celebrated on the third Monday of January. This year’s observance, though, fell on his actual January 15th birthday; King would have been 95.

Not to be outdone, I occasionally hoisted my own sign (Thanks, Alice Walker, for this good quote.)

(Friend-of-author Photo)

But I really wanted this one:

MLK on darkness

Dr. King would, I think, have approved.

One celebration of his legacy involved a collaboration between members of a fairly mainline Presbyterian church in an affluent area of San Francisco and members of a soul-spirited Pentecostal church in the city’s Bayview community, where crime and poverty run rampant. The partnership – and friendship – between the two unlikely groups has been growing ever since its beginning in response to the mass shootings at Charleston’s Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015.

For openers, the African American Pentecostal pastor preached (only minimally more reserved and shorter than is his custom) to the mostly white Presbyterians. His message was primarily about the Biblical admonition to welcome the alien and show hospitality to strangers. He also had a few words about justice rolling down like a river, and about Martin Luther King Jr’s assertion that love will overcome racism, materialism and militarism.

MLK Day cable car

After the service some fifty or so Presbyterians boarded motorized cable cars and sang their way across town to the Pentecostal church. There the white pastor preached to the now-multicolor congregation about the Biblical suggestion that nothing much is required of believers other than to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Creator. He also had a few words about some of the ads he had noticed on the trip over. Dr. King, he suggested, probably didn’t live, work and die primarily so there would be three-day mattress sales, or a 25% MLK Weekend discount on leather jackets.

During the second service, which another minister termed Presbycostal, there was a generous amount of rousing hallelujah music led by the hosts and several gospel pieces from the visitors, whose choir director and trumpet-playing musician in residence made the trip.

MLK Day Dave & choir

After the second service the hosts surprised their guests with lunch in the adjacent social hall: homemade salads, chips and dips and plates of fried chicken. A dozen or so small children, varying shades of white, brown and black, snagged their fried chicken early and set to entertaining themselves by jumping up and down a stairway below a banner that read “The Audacity to Believe.”

One of the visitors remarked to one of the hostesses, as everyone dispersed, “I think we had a lot more fun than anybody at the weekend sales.”

MLK Day lunch