Ayala: San Antonio overcompensates for the sins of others with its MLK events – San Antonio Express-News

Throughout the United States, resisters pushed back on a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

Some states made their point by holding out until the 2000s to establish a holiday signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

Other local governments found creative ways to minimize King by generalizing the holiday, so as not to name him, or creating a dual holiday, so the honor wouldnt be his exclusively.

Texas eventually got around to it, but it also has a Confederate Heroes Day that this year falls one day before MLKs.

San Antonio leaders wisely chose a different path, and San Antonio activists, ever resourceful, have overcompensated for the sins of others.

So, on Monday the city will put on one of the largest MLK marches in the country. Its the highlight of more than 1,000 events from Jan. 10-26 that are part of DreamWeek. Each day offers experiences that nudge us out of our comfort zones.

An event tonight will showcase a talk on wage equity thats listed as a demand, Pay Her What Shes Worth. The discussion is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the YWCA Olga Madrid Center on the West Side. Another event features a discussion of Kings legacy of resistance and what we can do when laws and law enforcement practices stifle protest. Its from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Travis Park Church downtown. Both events are free.

National holidays, when theyre relevant, give us a multitude of teaching moments and opportunities to cross self-imposed borders and meet people unlike us. Thats Kings legacy, too.

But the Student Leadership Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio gets the prize for its Civil Rights and Social Justice Experience, a bus tour of civil rights landmarks in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

At its most powerful, the tour drew a line from slavery to mass incarceration. Now in its ninth year, the tour ended by challenging a group of 45 students to connect what they learned on the trip to their leadership aspirations.

It was no coincidence the tour paid homage to the journeys of young Freedom Riders who in the 1960s boarded buses to Southern states, sat at whites-only lunch counters and faced violence from police and white mobs.

The bus got back Saturday. On Sunday, two of the students 21-year-old juniors Sydney Brown and Christopher Garcia met me at a coffee shop near the UTSA campus to digest their experiences.

It was Browns second trip and her first as a facilitator and part of the faculty. The return visit brought new experiences, especially at the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Ala.

The institute has been much in the news thanks to a new movie, Just Mercy, that tells the story of its founder, Bryan Stevenson, and his work on mass incarceration. The group saw the movie there on opening day in an auditorium that was all their own.

Its also where the group visited one of the nations most compelling new monuments, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to the victims of white supremacy. The memorial features 800 massive steel blocks that are suspended from the ceiling, each etched with the name of a county in which African Americans were lynched, and if known, the names of the victims.

Brown was moved by an exhibit at the Equal Justice Initiatives Legacy Museum, where people can pick up phones and hear the original testimony of the initiatives clients. She met Kuntrell Jackson there. At 14, he received a life sentence for a murder he didnt commit. The initiative won his release.

Garcia, a history major who wants to teach high school social studies, sought out the trip because he wanted to learn more about civil rights than what can be found in books.

He was struck by an exhibit of segregated classrooms and a sign that that read, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Mexicans from 1939 El Paso. He stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where marchers were beat up in whats known as Bloody Sunday.

Garcia took dozens of photos to document his experience. But at the 18th-century Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, he stopped clicking. The silence startled him.

A guide showed them various sites, including rusty cells used first for slave auctions and later to hold convicts and a memorial to slaves who participated in an 1811 revolt. Many of the slaves who were caught were executed and beheaded. The memorial depicts rows of decapitated ceramic heads mounted on steel rods burrowed into the ground.

There, Garcia stopped taking pictures, partly out of respect. It was also awe because what was meant as a warning to slaves didnt end the rebellions. For the future teacher, its a lesson that will stay with him for future lectures and future MLK Days.

Elaine Ayala is a columnist covering San Antonio and Bexar County. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | eayala@express-news.net | Twitter: @ElaineAyala

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Ayala: San Antonio overcompensates for the sins of others with its MLK events - San Antonio Express-News