Revitalizing Our Community held its 13th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration Monday.
Despite the frigid temperatures with wind chills in the teens, a group of approximately 30 began the event with a march from the MLK Plaza at the intersection of Austin and Commerce up Baker Street, over to Cordell Street, culminating at the Bennie Houston Recreation Center, where a packed house attended a 90-minute ceremony inside the gymnasium.
ROC Executive Board President Draco Miller Jr. spoke about the theme of the 13th Annual MLK Celebration, which was “Unity and Strength: We Are One.”
Miller said, “As you look around this room, you can see a unified group and that we’re standing as one. When you think about unity and strength and Dr. Martin Luther King and everything he drempt of and everything he wanted to happen, it started with unity. He wanted the nation to come together, he wanted the people to come together, he wanted communities to come together, he wanted us to be unified. But not only to be unified, but to be strong when we are unified. If you’re unified and put strength behind that, that’s when you’re really powerful.
“To unify is to come together for the betterment of something, and to do that you must give of yourself to that which is greater than yourself, which is a common cause. Strength is the capacity for an object, substance or group to be able to withstand pressure. If Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights crew, as I like to call them, if they weren’t united and strong, then the pressures of life, the pressure of the community, the pressures of the nation, would have had them fall. They had to be strong in one accord to be able to press forward toward the goal of unifying.
“We want to unify, to come together, to stand together in one accord against all obstacles, no matter what that might be. In all we do, we must remember we are one – we are one people, we are one race, we are one city, we are one community, we are one state, we are one nation, under one God. That’s who we are, and we need to remember that.”
Sareta Spratt-Delgado then introduced keynote speaker Sherley Spears, who spoke at the Central Texas Veterans Memorial program in Brownwood back in November, was the driving force behind the creation of the Buffalo Soldiers Memorial in San Angelo, is a past President of the San Angelo NAACP, and is a current member of the Texas NAACP State Conference Secretary
Spears provided the hundreds in attendance with an in-depth background on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and also echoed many of Miller’s sentiments on the theme of the day, calling on older and younger citizens to come together for a common cause.
Spears said, “What we aspire to become is one. That doesn’t mean you completely disregard who you are as an individual, but you always want to work toward a cause with someone else because you can get more done when you’re not having to do it yourself.”
Spears spoke on growing up during the day of King’s fight for equal rights.
“I was able to experience that and he was so awesome in the 60s when he was out there making the world a better place,” Spears said. “He was almost like a messiah, a prophet, whatever you want to call it, to a young girl like myself and my sisters growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. We weren’t learning everything from watching the news, and we certainly didn’t have Facebook or TikTok or anything else. We were living it, and it was important for us to understand what those older women and older men taught us in real life in living color. We were making history, Dr. King was making history. Growing up in segregated communities we could only live in certain areas and go to certain schools, but we were one because of our proximity to each other and policies that kept us together and separate from the rest of the world.”
Spears further expanded on the pledge for unity with her call to action.
“I want to encourage the millennials and the baby boomers to connect,” Spears said. “Millenials have the technology, boomers have the original blueprint. We need you to help us make it better but not change the whole concept of what we’re trying to do, but to listen and then share and then help us improve the blueprint. We have to teach the millienials and the generations between how to do it, and they can’t do it if they’ve not been taught. If we don’t teach them, they will never know, and both sides have to listen, because you don’t always know. And together, we will find out which direction to go. So my call to action to all of you is to do something special this week. Do something, or think about doing something, in your community about making a change in the City of Brownwood and Brown County.”
Prior to the march, Pastor Joey Bishop of Victory Life Church offered a scripture reading and Pastor Eric Jordan of A Breath of Praise Community Church provided the invocation.
At the Bennie Houston Recreation Center, Lajon Miller served as the master of ceremonies while the Brownwood Mighty Maroon Marching Band played the national anthem and Pastor Charles Lowe closed with the benediction.
In between, Charity Adams offered reflections on Dr. King, Domonique Glaeske and Pastor Ernest Kirk sang worship songs, and Harold Hogan introduced the ROC board and made announcements regarding upcoming events, including an ROC-led Juneteenth celebration this summer.