King’s message finds open ears with KCK audience

Kansas City, Kan. community came together at Memorial Hall to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday — the 45th annual celebration. The event was co-hosted by the Baptist Ministerial Alliance and the Unified Government. Rev. Tony Carter of Salem Missionary Baptist Church was the master of ceremonies.

Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago was the featured speaker. Trinity is best known as the former congregation of former US President Barack Obama. Moss brought a challenging and inspiring message that was equal parts sermon and history lesson.

He opened with the Carl Wendell Hines poem “A Dead Man’s Dream,” which includes the lines, “Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him…Dead men make such convenient heroes.”

Moss stressed Hines’s point that much of King’s message is ignored today and went beyond racial equality to addressing wealth inequality, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and advocating social justice.

The pastor closed his sermon with an exhortation to keep “dancing in the dark,” a reference to a story when he suspected a burglar in the home, only to find his young daughter practicing for a ballet in her room at three in the morning.

In between, he took the audience on a trip through the civil rights movement’s lesser known players, acknowledging that King could not have had the same impact on his own.

Moss told of Georgia Gilmore, leader of the “Club from Nowhere,” a largely anonymous group of cooks and bakers who financed the Montgomery bus boycott by advance selling their wares to their largely white patrons.

He praised Claudette Colvin, a single mother arrested for sitting in the front of a Montgomery bus even before the well-known Rosa Parks.

Moss’s humorously-told tale of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council taking action to print boycott flyers while King and other male leaders argued among themselves drew laughter and applause.

Music from the MLK Mass Choir and the Kaw Valley Baptist Youth Choir was a highlight of the event, getting the assembled crowd clapping and singing along.

Scholarships Awarded to Wyandotte County Students

The event closed with the awarding of scholarships to 36 Wyandotte County high school seniors. Frances-Faith Obiesie, a Piper senior, received a scholarship and afterwards spoke about how King’s legacy of faith has affected her and her family.

“[King’s] faith is a huge factor in my legacy,” said the future electrical engineering student.

“For my parents, when I was 20 weeks in my mom’s womb, the doctors thought there was something wrong with me. Their faith and how they’ve powered through life and how they’ve been good examples of faith and integrity and upholding God’s will in our life, that has been such a driving factor for me.”

The Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office, led by DA Mark Dupree, sponsored five scholarships, and spoke highly of the recipients. “[We saw]  their dedication to education, their desire to thrive, not just where they are but in the future, and then a willingness to come back and give to Wyandotte County.”

Dupree also spoke passionately of King’s commitment to justice and how it affects his work as a prosecutor. “As Dr. King said in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“As the elected DA, the chief law enforcement official, my only job is to make sure that justice is seen for the entire community — for victims of crime, for those who are charged with crimes, for everyone in this community to make sure that it is safe where we live and breathe.”

Dupree’s view of people as creations of God drives his view of serving justice and referred back to the verses of the Biblical prophet Micah.

“It’s about being humble, it’s about doing justice, and it’s about showing mercy to everybody,” said the prosecutor, named in June as president of the Kansas Bar Association. “You cannot pursue justice without having a heart for God’s people, and you can’t have a heart for God’s people if you don’t have a heart for God.”

“What fuels us to do this work for God’s people is the fact that we know God loves us and we love God.”