People seeking to improve their lives need first to take responsibility for themselves to better their communities and become good "stewards" of Martin Luther King's legacy, a pastor told more than 250 who gathered Monday at a prayer breakfast in Little Rock.
In an impassioned keynote address that drew frequent applause, Christopher Davis of the St. Paul Baptist Church in Memphis challenged those in attendance to use the King holiday as a catalyst to do good on that day and the year that follows by first focusing inward.
"You can change everything around you, you can change all your friends, you can change the places you go, but if you don't change you, you won't be faithful to the changes you decided to make," he said. "You can't raise the question about what Dr. King would think about our communities, our schools, our children, police brutality, the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots and so forth and so on and not recognize that the common denominator in all of those is us."
Davis's address came during the King Interfaith Prayer Breakfast in Little Rock, an annual event sponsored by the Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission.
The gathering drew a large crowd, including several prominent local leaders and one well-known soap opera actor, to Saint Mark Baptist Church in Little Rock. Eric Braeden, a longtime fixture on The Young and the Restless, sat at the front table alongside Davis, Hill, Cotton, House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas Conner Eldridge and MLK Commission Executive Director DuShun Scarbrough. Braeden was set to speak at a separate King event in Benton later Monday morning.
At the Little Rock gathering, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Dardanelle, led a prayer, saying King's legacy should stand as an example for those confronting injustice. And U.S. Rep. French Hill, R-Little Rock, said citizens should take advantage of the day to do good in King's honor.
"Get out there and serve today," he said.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola reflected on King's doctrine of nonviolence, noting last July marked the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and August brought "what has simply become known as Ferguson and the bitterness over the death of a black teenager by a white police officer."
"[That] reminds us that the issues of race, violence and nonviolence are still simmering and ready to explode at any moment," he said, recalling King's Selma-to-Montgomery march. "... We still have to strive to practice and preach, to educate our young people about the importance of Dr. King's message of nonviolence."