Green Bay residents gathered at several events to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Celebrations included church services, community service projects, and a youth basketball tournament.
Many participants expressed optimism and the importance of continuing to spread King’s message of love and equality.
The best part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, for Terry Cook, a deacon at Divine Temple Church of God in Christ, is in the middle, when King responds to those who asked civil rights activists when they will be satisfied.
They would not put an end to their desire “until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” King said in 1963 and Cook repeated Jan. 19 in his reading of the speech at the church’s 20th annual Martin Luther King Day celebration, one of several events held that day in Green Bay.
The virtues upheld at the church event, of faith and perseverance, were seen as especially needed now by attendees and local officials who pointed to the troubled times of the nation. Many celebrating the federal holiday in the city, like Cook, chose optimism and to remember King’s dream of just treatment for all as a guiding light in the distance.
“We still ain’t reached where we’re supposed to be,” Cook said in an interview. “As long we keep getting the message out, year after year, sooner or later, it’s going to take.”
The message was made the most plain and direct by about 40 children who arrived from the Madison-area in song and skit. In front of the pulpit and the local and state officials seated behind it, they fanned out and asked that everyone be kind and love.
“When you choose love, you keep the dream alive,” one kid said, prompting a chorus from the rest of “Love one another,” before they returned to their pews.
Celebrations of King’s legacy were not something Cook saw much in the city when he moved from Chicago in 1994. The federal holiday was first observed nationwide in 1986 and there was “little going on in Green Bay to draw attention to the life of the slain civil rights leader” aside from some events hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported at the time.
To not celebrate King − remembered in the church event as much as a preacher born in Atlanta as a civil rights leader in the 1950s and 1960s − was unthinkable for those who viewed the man as a torchbearer. The family of Taseline Rodgers, three generations of whom came to the church, has celebrated the holiday from the time she was born. Rodgers’ grandfather from Mississippi made sure of it.
“And it was actually an actual celebration, just like they celebrate Thanksgiving,” Rodgers said. “The fact of everything that was happening to Mississippi, when Martin Luther King came along, my grandfather made sure that we all knew our history.”
The Divine Temple Church of God’s former pastor, L. C. Green, marched with King during the civil rights movement and reminded the congregation of it often, Cook said. The former pastor told the Press-Gazette in 2008 that he was still working toward King’s dream.
Those celebrating King 18 years later still saw justice unfulfilled, progress made, and setbacks aplenty.
“The government we have now is trying to subside the message like it’s not that important anymore,” Cook said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Oh, we’re equal already. Stop crying.’ We’re not equal already. There’s still a long ways to go.”
Progress, said Charles Caston, a community partner navigator at We All Rise African American Resource Center, would be made “with a thousand cuts in the same spot.” As proof of progress, he pointed to America’s first Black president, the first Black vice president, and to the event around him, the Green Bay Conservation Corps’ third annual celebration in honor of King where attendees at the Brown County Central Library made care packages for the homeless alongside Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez.
Caston, like others, did not want to dwell too long on a downer.
The holiday, though officially a national day of service meant to get Americans volunteering in their communities, was still a celebration at its core. The Greater Green Bay YMCA hosted a basketball tournament beginning at 9 a.m as their way of honoring King’s legacy, which delighted Caston.
And Pastor Alice Green, who took over Divine Temple Church of God and Christ from her husband after his death, said the act of congregating that day was fulfilling the duty King called for.
“We are going forward, not backward,” Green said to applause. “So hold your head up, love everybody, treat everybody right.”