Asheville Peace March for Martin Luther King Jr.: 'Soft-minded always fear change'
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ASHEVILLE – On a cold, gray and rainy Monday afternoon, parishioners emerged from St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church ready to march in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brass Your Heart, Asheville’s own radical marching band, greeted the churchgoers. The band was ready for the occasion, some dressed in raincoats. One saxophonist wrapped their instrument in a plastic trash bag.
Standing outside the church, waiting for the march to begin and wearing a pin affixed to her raincoat commemorating the 2001 march, Catherine Ball told the Citizen Times that she attended the rally in solidarity for peace.
“We don’t have it yet,” said Ball about peace and equality. She has lived in Asheville more than 67 years.
This was the culminating event of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Asheville and Buncombe County’s annual three-day commemoration of the civil rights leader. The event began Saturday with a prayer breakfast, continued Sunday with a candlelight service and finished with the march and rally. It was the association’s 43rd annual celebration of King.
Asheville City Council Member Kim Roney, a member of the band, played a headless tambourine. Buncombe County Commissioner Parker Sloan pushed his 3-year-old daughter, who attended the march for the first time, in a stroller.
The group began to march down Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, spilling into College Street, where cars driving the opposite direction rolled their windows down. One toddler poked their head out to wave at the weather-braving marchers.
Wearing a beanie with a crying while laughing emoji, Paul Scott, 56, said he wanted to keep “the dream” alive, a reference to King’s famous 1963 speech during the March on Washington.
Scott and the crowd filed into Pack Square for a rally that more than 300 people attended. It was held steps from the former location of the Vance Gap Monument, which commemorated racist Civil War-era Gov. Zebulon Vance. As a U.S. congressman, Vance disparaged Black people, once saying that their blood contained “a putrid stream of African barbarism.”
Although the Asheville City Council voted to remove the monument in 2021, the obelisk’s invisible shadow is a not-so-distant reminder of North Carolina’s Confederate past.
Cassandra Wells, who is Black and teaches second graders at Claxton Elementary, told the Citizen Times that she brings a largely untaught history into her classroom.
During math lessons, Wells said she teaches her students about Benjamin Banneker, a Black mathematician, astronomer and surveyor whose father was an ex-slave, according to The White House Historical Association and the Benjamin Banneker Association. Throughout his 18th and early 19th century career, Banneker grappled with people who reduced his work because of his race.
Jonathan McCoy, director of the Center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Mars Hill University and vice chair of the MLK association board, took the stage. McCoy, wearing a black beanie and occasionally looking at the notes in his hands, launched into a rousing speech. He told the Citizen Times he honed the art of captivating a crowd while teaching sleepy students during his early morning history classes at the university.
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McCoy spoke about how King’s teachings from more than 60 years ago still apply today. Quoting King, McCoy said, "The soft-minded always fears change."
“Too many folks are soft-minded and are working to create a nation rooted in disunity for they truly believe that ‘We the People of the United States’ of the Constitution does not include the diversity of race, religion, gender, sexual identity, and the many other aspects of our society,” McCoy told the crowd.
He would go on to list landmark Supreme Court rulings that have been picked apart, overturned or are under threat, including the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Roe v. Wade, which established women’s right to an abortion in 1973. North Carolina’s state legislature has made access to voting more difficult and restricted abortion access.
McCoy told the crowd, “We must be tough-minded to see beyond the weakness of the soft-minded person while being tender-hearted to continue fighting to create a beloved community that even they will have equal place in.”
The crowd eventually dispersed, giving way to WestSound, another Asheville band, which played the outro for the rally.
Oralene Simmons, the founder of the association, told the Citizen Times after the rally that the weekend’s events exceeded expectations.
Mitchell Black covers Buncombe County and health care for the Citizen Times. Email him at mblack@citizentimes.com or follow him on Twitter @MitchABlack. Please help support local journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: 'We must be tough-minded.' Asheville marches for MLK
