News
Email
Print
About Justice
Marchers honor King by pursuing the same ideals that motivated him
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: January 22, 2008
More than 600 people endured chilly weather yesterday to march through downtown Winston-Salem in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and, for many marchers, to call for the release of Kalvin Michael Smith.
Smith's supporters say he was wrongly imprisoned for the near-fatal beating of Jill Marker in 1995.
As past MLK Day marches called for the release of Darryl Hunt, who spent 18 years wrongly imprisoned, organizers said it was time to turn to a new cause.
"We have to represent what Martin Luther King stood for," said Gus Dark, Smith's father. "It is about peace, it is about justice, it is about love."
King, who was born on Jan. 15, 1929, would have been 79 on his birthday. In 1986, Congress designated the third Monday in January as the King national holiday. The civil-rights leader was killed April 4, 1968, by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tenn.
It was about 15 degrees yesterday morning and warmed into the 20s by the time marchers assembled at Mount Zion Baptist Church on File Street near Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Darien Lyles, 13, marched for the first time with her grandmother, Helen Glenn.
"It's a good thing to do, to march for freedom," Darien said.
The size of the crowd impressed her, and it was nice to see marchers young and old, Glenn said.
"It turned out good for the weather, as cold as it is," Glenn said.
Inside the Benton Convention Center, where the march ended, organizers played a recording that Smith made in prison.
Smith's case has drawn the attention of Duke University's Innocence Project, which says that key witnesses have recanted the testimony implicating Smith.
Smith said on the recording that he didn't know Jill Marker and never went inside the Silk Plant Forest, the store in which she was beaten.
"Society must not wait until injustice comes knocking at the door before they get involved in the fight against injustice," Smith said.
"Until I am free and the true culprit of this heinous act is charged and arrested, justice will not have been served," he said.
At the commemoration inside the convention center, community leaders challenged the crowd of more than 800 to do more to root out injustice, calling on residents to vote and to advocate for education and economic equality.
"If comprehensive health care is good enough for the president and the vice president, then it's good enough for every American family," Mayor Allen Joines told the crowd.
Stephen Hairston, the president of the local NAACP, challenged churches to tutor children at schools in their neighborhoods.
"I'm sure we can make a difference in our children's lives," he said.
Henry J. Pankey, the keynote speaker, said that King's legacy has been "sanitized" to remove some of the ways that King challenged the Vietnam War and economic injustice.
Pankey, an assistant principal at Parkland High School, has also worked as a principal at schools in New York and as a motivational speaker.
"The best way to have peace is to ensure justice. If you want peace in the suburbs, then you must have justice in the projects," he said. "If you want to have peace in the White House, then you must have justice in the poorhouse."
n Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at
Email
Print
