Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Thousands of people, moved by such world issues as the war in Iraq and such local ones as the recent release of Darryl Hunt, attended various Martin Luther King Jr. Day events yesterday in Winston-Salem.
About 2,000 people, a crowd that organizers called the largest since the observance began in 1981, went out in brisk morning temperatures for the traditional late-morning march downtown. The march honored King, the civil-rights leader who was killed April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn. He would have been 75 this month.
Hunt and his wife, April, were among the leaders as the procession walked from Mount Zion Baptist Church on File Street to the Benton Convention Center on Fifth Street.
Hunt said he was grateful to participate; he last marched on King Day in January 1990 after he had been released from prison while awaiting the second of his two murder trials. He was later convicted and sentenced again to life in prison.
Hunt said that taking part in the march yesterday felt different from his experience 14 years ago.
"More people are educated about the criminal-justice system now," Hunt said. "The whole truth, the complete truth, has come out."
Hunt spent 18 years in prison after being convicted in the August 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a case that divided the city along racial lines.
Organizers said yesterday that they hoped this year's march would help heal the city.
Hunt was released Dec. 24 on an unsecured bond after investigators said that they had matched DNA evidence in the Sykes case to another man, Willard Brown. Brown has been charged with murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping and is now imprisoned; Hunt is awaiting a Feb. 6 hearing at which his conviction could be overturned.
Robert Elliot, a member of the Winston-Salem Human Relations Commission, was among those who said that Hunt had become a symbol of racial justice.
During his comments at the 24th Annual King Commemoration at the convention center, Elliot pointed to the Hunt case as a reason there should be a moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina. The first jury that convicted Hunt rejected the death penalty, and recommended a life sentence for him.
He said that the DNA evidence, which in 1994 excluded Hunt as the person who had raped Sykes, should have resulted in his freedom.
"Our criminal justice system did not respond," he told about 1,200 people in the convention center. "Our system remained blind to injustice."
Before the march, hundreds of people took part in separate breakfasts, at Mount Zion Baptist Church and at Winston-Salem State University's Anderson Center, to mark King Day. Then, yesterday evening, at a service at St. Stephen Missionary Baptist Church, Hunt received the Martin Luther King Jr. Courage Award given by the Ministers' Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity.
Several marchers said they participated partly because of the Hunt case, and the event showed that people of various races are coming together, said the Rev. James Fulwood, the pastor of St. Mark Baptist Church in Winston-Salem.
"This cause is reaching people deeply," Fulwood said.
State Rep. Larry Womble, who has participated in every King Day march in the city, used a bullhorn to yell chants. As the participants gathered in front of the convention center, Womble and the crowd said, "Fired up. Ain't going to take it no more!"
Donald Hunter of Winston-Salem said that the King holiday helped downtown marchers focus on Hunt's case and the war in Iraq.
"Whether we agree over what (President) Bush does, we all have to stand up," Hunter said. "Conflict brings people together."
The Rev. Claude R. Alexander Jr. of University Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, the keynote speaker at the Benton center, said that King would have opposed the war.
Alexander said that King's dream should challenge all Americans, including Bush, to remember the power of nonviolence.
Bombing Iraq and creating as many Fortune 500 companies as possible does not lead to America becoming a better country, he said. If the United States has money to bomb Iraq, he said, then it should have money to improve education and rebuild the nation's cities.
John Owen of Winston-Salem said he participated in the march to honor King's memory.
"He was the greatest prophet that our nation ever had," Owen said. "God sent Dr. King for that purpose."