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Paradegoers in Tampa reflect on the conflict over civil rights during the King years and on a new generation that did not live through those difficult times.
By SARAH SCHWEITZER
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001
TAMPA -- Under a blue sky, it rained beads and candy. Dolores Lake smiled as she watched children dart for the treats tossed by parade marchers. Happy day, she said, happy day.
But she wasn't about to forget the darker, sadder days of her youth in Tifton, Ga., the days before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared his dream and before he led the march from Selma.
"I remember when I worked in a restaurant and I could work in the back, but I couldn't eat in the front as a customer," the 58-year-old said. "A lot of the young people don't understand the struggle we went through, the things Martin Luther King died for."
So there she was Monday afternoon, a front-row spectator at Tampa's fifth annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, marveling at the commemoration she never could have imagined as a girl in her hometown.
Lake joined a crowd estimated by police at more than 10,000. Parade organizers said turnout was nearly double last year's, thanks to the banding together of groups that traditionally had organized separate King day festivities.
The communities of St. Petersburg, Clearwater, east and west Pasco County and Brooksville also observedKing's birthday with a variety of events.
In Tampa, marching bands from as far as Albany, Ga., took the 1.6-mile route that began at Blake High School, marched up W Main Street, crossed S Rome Avenue, returned down W Cypress Street and ended at Pepin-Rood Stadium.
At the stadium, parade marchers and other entertainers continued the celebration with a festival of dance and gospel singing that lasted until 4 p.m.
Organizers said some children suffered heat exhaustion in the midday sun.
But Allen Jackson Jr. showed no signs of slowing from the heat as he bobbed for beads.
Asked what he liked about the parade, Jackson offered his best recitation of lessons from his sixth-grade class at Eisenhower Middle School.
"He had a dream. He wanted all black and white people to come together," said the gap-toothed 11-year-old, adding with a smile: "But I also like the beads."
His father, Allen Jackson, said he wishes his son learned more about King in his school, the way he had in the aftermath of the assassination. But Jackson said he is grateful for the racial climate in Tampa, which he called less divisive than in his hometown of Detroit.
"As long as you were in the city you were fine. But as soon as you left the city, you feared for your life," said Jackson, a retail manager who was transferred to Tampa two years ago. "It's less tense down here, more diverse. It's been like a weight off my shoulders."
Asantewa Ishangi, 20, watched the parade under the cool of a Duku, the traditional head wrap of her native Ghana. She was in Tampa to perform with her family, a traditional African dance troupe touring the United States.
In Ghana, she said, King is considered a hero and known to all, although no day is set aside on the calendar to commemorate his birth.
"He was a man of honor, strength and courage," she said. "Everyone knows his work."
As she does every year, Ethelrine Jefferson broke out a white T-shirt emblazoned with King's face. She explained that she bought the shirt in New Orleans but wears it only on King's birthday.
Like others of her generation, she remembers the 1960s. Safe in Sanford, Jefferson, 56, said she watched news reports in horror, unable to fathom what was going on Birmingham, where her aunts and uncles lived.
But on W Main Street on Monday afternoon, with the blare of the Blake High School marching band, it all seemed a long ways away for Jefferson.