Speeches, music honor Martin Luther King, Jr. in Santa Rosa

The hope that lifted up the crowd at Santa Rosa High School, where the annual celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. was held Sunday, was rived as well by sadness and a stern anger.

Rev. Amy Seymour Haney of the Windsor Presbyterian Church told attendees, “We stand in hope.” But, as a soft melody played on a piano, Haney also said: “We stand in trepidation, in perplexity, in horror and in anger at the atrocities delivered to our African-American sisters and brothers in this country.”

Near the beginning of the event, the “Negro National Anthem” - “Lift Every Voice and Sing” - was sung. The crowd of more than 300 people in the high school auditorium stood and sang with one voice: “Let us march on ‘til victory is won.”

Near the end, the daughter of Ralph Abernathy, a close friend of King's and a renowned civil rights leader, spoke in the same breath of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot dead in November 2014 by a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, as he sat on a park bench with an airsoft replica handgun.

But Donzaleigh Abernathy also pronounced her certainty that there is hope for change in human action, in the memory of the work done in the civil rights era by her father and King and others, “both black and white.”

“Every year when we come together and pause, I'm reminded of what is possible,” she said.

Over the years the Santa Rosa event, now in its 36th year, has covered wide ground. It has touched on national issues like intolerance of Muslims following the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks; it has commemorated departed Sonoma County African-American leaders like the Rev. James Coffee, who died in 2010; and it has confronted local traumas like the 2013 killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was carrying an airsoft BB gun a sheriff's deputy mistook for an assault rifle.

It draws people from around the Bay Area.

“It's inspiring,” said Henry Garrison, 67, of Marin City, who recalled listening with his mother to radio broadcasts of King's era-defining speeches.

“He empowered people, he empowered the masses,” Garrison said.

This year's theme - “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” - echoed a line from King's 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

A long-beloved feature of the event is the delivery of speeches by high school students who have won awards for oratory inspired by the craft and message of King's famous speeches.

Maria Carrillo High School freshman Eden Luvishis, winner in the junior division, recited a list of bigotries: “Racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and anti-semitism,” and likened their appearance to wildfires. They are fanned these days, she said, by politicians whom she likened to “arsonists.” She named none, but referred to campaign calls to deport Latinos and bar Syrian refugees from the United States.

“What we must do now is come together to put it out,” she said. “To say that King succeeded, we must continue what he started.”

The senior division winner, Holman Pettibonek, took on the resurgent issue of voting rights, denouncing political and legal maneuvering and actions that Democrats and activists say are intended to make it harder for minorities to vote.

“We are living in an unjust democracy,” said the Maria Carrillo High senior. “Voting shouldn't be this hard. The fundamentals of democracy shouldn't be so convoluted in practice.”

And he singled out voter apathy, particularly among younger generations. “It's your responsibility, and it's my responsibility, to make the dream come true. And we start by voting,” he said.

In the audience, Jacqueline Lawrence, 54, of Windsor said hearing Abernathy speak earlier in the day at the Community Baptist Church in Santa Rosa “brought chills to my soul.”

Sunday's event is too rare for its kind, she said.

“This is wonderful, for blacks and whites to come together and support the cause of unity and love,” she said. “But that should not just happen on just this one day. These are things we need to hear about all the time.”

The free event was hosted by the MLK Committee and co-sponsored by the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County.

King's birthday is Monday. The Community Baptist Church is hosting a daylong celebration, and organizing service projects, starting at 10 a.m.