Tuesday, Jan. 10 2012 6:47PM
City’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebration hopes to attract young and old
By Miranda Wycoff, mwycoff@lsjournal.com
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ReprintDuring the past 15 years the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. event has evolved from a small gathering to a citywide celebration of diversity.
And this year will be no different.
The event will begin a little earlier this year – at 5:30 instead of 6 p.m. – for the pre-show, which will include cultural exhibits from the Lee’s Summit R-7 School District and individuals from the community as well as a performance by the Lee’s Summit West High School Drumline.
The program is set to begin at 6 p.m. and will include a variety of cultural performances including El Grupo Atotonilco, a Kansas City based Latin dance group, Nartan Academy of Dance, an Indian dance group and Heritage Dance Ministry. In addition, students at Lee’s Summit West High School, Lee’s Summit High School and Pleasant Lea Middle School will be performing.
But while the Martin Luther King Junior Celebration Committee has always strived to make the event about diversity, committee chair Emmanuel Ngomsi always noticed one subset that was missing. “In the past, we looked around the room and there were 500 or 600 people, but we usually see a lot of older adults. There weren’t a lot of young people,” Ngomsi said. And even when there were young people in the audience, it was usually family members of performers.
This year, Ngomsi says the committee is focused on bringing in the younger generations.
That’s why the committee asked Pastor Armour D. Stephenson, III of City of Truth Church in Kansas City.
Stephenson, a Lee’s Summit High School graduate, began pastoring at City of Truth at the age of 22 after his parents, who pastored the church before him, were killed in a tragic plane crash Jan. 21, 2005. Since he took over the reigns, City of Truth become one of the fastest growing churches in the region and continues to experience remarkable growth, according it its website.
“Our main goal has been to focus on getting a diverse group of keynote speakers,” Ngomsi said. “We have had women, African Americans and Caucasians. This year we were able to bring in a younger speaker.” The theme to this year’s MLK Celebration is “Stone of Hope,” one Ngomsi and the committee chose because of a passage from Dr. King as well the national MLK monument in Washington D.C. that was just unveiled. “The theme this year is extremely important,” Ngomsi said. “Dr. King said in his ‘I have a dream,’ speech, ‘We shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.’
It tells us that everything may look bad, but there is always hope,” Ngomsi said.
He said the message of Dr. King is important to a growing community like Lee’s Summit.
“At this minute, there are more than 30 different countries represented in Lee’s Summit, with families speaking 19 different languages,” Ngomsi said. “The message of Martin Luther King, Jr., really resonates clearly and powerfully in a community like ours that is growing and becoming increasingly diverse."
Stone of Hope When: 5:30 p.m., Jan. 16 Where: The Pavilion at John Knox Village, 520 S.W. Murray Road, Lee’s Summit What: A free community-wide event celebrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
