Paul “Benji” Johnston, 6, climbed onto a 2-foot-high stool, leaned into the microphone, took a deep breath and made his case.
“Why do people hurt other people? Is it because they get mad? Is it because they want something they can’t have?” said Paul, the first-place winner in the kindergarten-second-grade category of the speech contest for the 30th anniversary Martin Luther King Birthday
Celebration, held Sunday at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee.
For Paul, a student at Eastbrook Academy, it was all about dealing with naughty while staying nice.
King, he said, was a smart man.
“He believed in God, and being like Jesus,” Paul said. He said he was inspired by that, so it just made sense: “If people are being naughty, do not be naughty back.”
With the theme, “Nonviolence: The Most Potent Weapon,” Sunday’s event was a joyous celebration featuring the music of the Bear Clan Singers and Dancers, the Greater Milwaukee Fire and Police Pipes and Drums, Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra Calypso Steel
Band, Ina Onilu Dance and Drum Ensemble, Latino Arts Mariachi Juvenile group and Milwaukee Chinese Youth Orchestra.
Milwaukee is one of just two cities that has held an annual event celebrating King’s birthday since 1984, organizers say. The other city is Atlanta.
Paul pointed out that there was a time when people with dark skin had to sit in the back of a bus, while people with lighter skin sat in the front.
That would mean that his two grandfathers would have had to sit in the back.
“That is not nice,” he said.
In an interview later, while running up and down steps outside the Uihlein Hall auditorium, Paul said that his mother, Lisa Johnston, helped him research and write his essay.
They listened to King’s speeches on YouTube.com, as well as books and an animated educational site, Brainpop.com.
The reason he wanted to write it — besides the fact that his sister and brother also were entering the contest:
“I want to be like Dr. King. I want to learn how to be nice.”
Paul and other students at Sunday’s event reflected on King’s message through speech, essay and art contests. Community leaders offered words on King’s life, too.
Sunday’s gathering “reaffirms our youth and it reaffirms the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Mayor Tom Barrett said.
“We are instilling in them … the virtues and the strengths they need to be strong citizens,” he said.
Joan M. Prince, vice chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who recently served as representative to the United Nations, recalled seeing King speak in Milwaukee on Jan. 26, 1964. She was 10 years old.
She and her family waited to see him, and when he finally arrived, she said, “I just wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about.
“He wasn’t a very tall man,” she said. And he wasn’t movie-star handsome. “He just seemed like a normal person.
“Then he opened his mouth. I’d never heard anyone speak like he did.”
She remembered, too, that afterward, he put one hand on her head, another hand on her sister’s head and said five words that she would always remember:
“Be blessed and stay prayerful.”
In a plea to end violence, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, who represents Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional District, looked into the crowd and said, “You’re our hope. You’re what we’re looking for.”
Milwaukee 6th District Ald. Milele Coggs called King “a difference-maker.”
The greatest tribute to him “is to commit our lives to change,” she said. “This world needs you to be the difference-maker.”
***
King Day celebration
The Milwaukee Justice Coalition will hold its annual Martin Luther King Day Justice Program and March at 1 p.m. Monday at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, 1927 N. 4th St.
After the program, a three-block march is planned at 2:30 p.m. The march ends at the King statue on N. King Drive.