Event keeps alive King's legacy

In Carroll County, speakers recall days of segregation and strides toward better society

At the annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast in Westminster yesterday, members of the Carroll County NAACP shared memories and applauded stirring reiterations of speeches delivered decades ago by leaders of the civil rights movement.

The local branch was continuing the event established nearly 20 years ago by the Former Students and Friends of Robert Moton School Inc. to pay homage to King and to raise scholarship funds for Carroll's minority students. Among the audience of nearly 200 people gathered at Martin's Westminster were many graduates of what was, until 1964, the county's only high school for African-Americans.

"We have to educate our young people so they realize the struggles we went through," said Charles Hollingsworth, a 1957 Moton graduate.

Bernard Jones, event organizer, said the gathering "helps us remember where we came from. Young folks don't realize what their parents and grandparents struggled through just so we could eat here. When I was growing up, there were businesses in the county that closed rather than integrate."

Several Carroll students paid tribute to Rosa Parks, using her words and photographs.

"I learned she had a big effect on kids and she changed things," said Seth Krolus, 13. "Now the next generation has to know what happened."

Guest speaker Ira Zepp, professor emeritus of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster and a King scholar, dwelled on "what King thought, not so much what he did." History should not "freeze King with the dream speech" of August 1963, he said. Many shouted "Amen!" when Zepp called King "a great spiritual leader of civilization, who is creatively still alive."

"He always followed every indictment he made of America with affirmation and hope," Zepp said. "We see that hope right here in Carroll County."

Zepp listed projects that "transform neighborhoods into sisterhoods and brotherhoods," including the Shalom Community Center under construction in Westminster; Common Ground on the Hill, a music and arts festival built on diversity at McDaniel; and Westminster Church of the Brethren, which lends its church weekly for Islamic services.

"Our challenge is to overcome our divisions and get to the promised land that Martin was only able to see," Zepp said.

Calvin W. Burnett, state secretary for higher education and retired president of what is now Coppin State University, said he has attended many King tributes, but "this one had substance." He called Zepp's speech unprecedented in dealing with King as a thinker.

For James P. Hammond, whose father, Murton, founded the NAACP's Carroll County chapter 50 years ago, Zepp's remarks were "right on the money."

"I remember driving all the way to Baltimore with my father once when I was a child," Hammond said. "We heard Martin Luther King speak, and my father said then, `There is a guy who will set the world on fire.'"

Patricia Greenwald spoke of efforts to restore into a museum a century-old former one-room schoolhouse for African-American students.

"Kids today say it is rude to call the building the Sykesville Colored Schoolhouse," she said. "Their grandmothers say that's what we have to call it so people know and remember."

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