The 2016 Freedom Celebration for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by the Saint Louis Art Museum was all about paying the tribute forward to the next person, or back to an elder who came before.
The celebration of King’s memory focused not on King himself but on his fellow civil rights leader Julian Bond (1940-2015), in the museum’s tradition of honoring “people who embodied King’s message of equality and civil rights,” said Sherri Williams, an associate educator in charge of the museum’s family programs, who led the celebration on Friday, January 15.
Marcus A. Creighton, who presented on Dr. King on behalf of their mutual fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, shared his moment in the spotlight with a young college leader for the Alphas. This young man said, “The youth who led the Civil Rights Movement are now my elders.”
Keynote speaker Eugene B. Redmond honored Bond largely by naming Bond’s influences. Redmond discussed Bond’s intellectual debt to W.E.B. Du Bois and how much he learned from fellow activists such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. In his closing remarks, Redmond dwelled on local civil rights leaders Frankie Muse Freeman, Percy Green II and Ivory Perry, as emblems of Bond. In parting, Redmond encouraged the audience to read a novel that Bond loved, “Jubilee” by Margaret Walker.
Even the musical selection involved a passing of the torch. Shalom Church (City of Peace), which has a nationally charting gospel record, was represented by its Next Generation Choir.
In fact, the annual event itself had a torch passing, as this was the first time since the museum started the Freedom Celebration in 2002 that Renee Franklin, director of Community Partnerships, did not lead the event.
Still, with all the shifts of focus, an image of Julian Bond did emerge: a path-breaking journalist, organizer, legislator, leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP – and poet.
Redmond, a widely published poet and poetry editor, first wrote about Bond as a poet in his landmark 1976 study of African-American poetry, “Drumvoices.” In a sassy piece of light verse by Bond, which Redmond read, the focus of the celebration returned to Dr. King, though as a punch line:
Look at that girl shake that thing,
We can’t all be Martin Luther King.
Creighton better captured the serious mood of the crowd. He imagined Dr. King appearing today and asking for an update on the nation he died trying to liberate. Creighton said we would have to tell Dr. King, “A 12-year-old African-American boy with a toy gun in an open-carry state was gunned down in two seconds and no one was held responsible. I’d hate to tell him we’re still not created equal.”
