London celebrates MLK Day

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January 19, 2010

Anonymous The Times-Tribune Tue Jan 19, 2010, 09:02 AM EST

By Carl Keith Greene / Staff Writer

London marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with a day-long event that included art, gospel music, a march down Main Street and a program at the community center.

Music from Calvin Baker, the Canyon Park Church singers, Lucille Fitzpatrick and others brought memories of Dr. King and his work to bring freedom to African Americans in the 1960s.

Memories of the April day in 1968 when King was assassinated in Memphis passed through the afternoon session.

Alfred Allen Riley, 58, recalled his experience on that day.

He had been living in the Washington, D.C. area but had moved back to London. That’s where he had heard the news.

“I saw on the news how people were burning down Washington. The riots were terrible. I couldn’t understand it, because the black people were doing it,” he recalled.

“They were tearing and burning up their own city.” When he moved back to the area, he worked restoring many of those damaged buildings, he said.

It’s hard to believe, he said, “that people could be so distraught that they don’t realize they are hurting themselves. Even during that time they set themselves back.”

Often, he said, it takes a tragedy for Americans to come together.

“I believe that if it wasn’t for (King’s) assassination, we still wouldn’t be free. We can go into restaurants today, sit anywhere. We can go places and do things that we would not have been doing.”

It took King’s death for America to be awakened, he said, adding “there were presidents behind him, senators behind him, people behind him that wanted civil rights to happen but they couldn’t really get out there and push it. They couldn’t put their hands in it because they knew it would be political death.”

“If the Kennedys hadn’t stood up for civil rights, they may still be living today because we don’t know the whole story,” he said.

Following the gospel music, the event moved to the steps of the Laurel County Courthouse where Mayor Troy Rudder spoke.

He recalled his youth and how as a 10-year-old, he watched civil rights unrest on television and wondered what the marches, speeches and burnings were really about.

“Living in a small white community and going to a small white school, I could only form opinions from what I saw on TV,” he said.

He closed by quoting King, “Darkness cannot drive out the darkness, only light can do that, hate cannot drive out the hate, only love can do that.”

The march from the courthouse to the community center was led by children.

The program at the community center began with the posting of the U.S. Flag by the South Laurel High Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps color guard.

Speakers included Bob Gates, director of the Kentucky Folklife Program of the Kentucky Historical Society.

Gates spoke on how we are all part of folk cultures, each portraying a part of the life of communities, families and other groups.

Also speaking was Samuel R. Coleman Jr. of Middlesboro, director of the Small Business Development Center at the Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College and a member of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights.

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