Young leaders delivered keynote calls to action during 2024's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday observance in Statesboro, from Georgia Southern University SGA President Blake Robinson at the prayer breakfast Saturday to Screven County NAACP Youth Council President Thomas L. James during the Bulloch County NAACP's service Monday after the parade.
About 200 people attended the prayer breakfast hosted jointly by the Bulloch County NAACP Youth Council and Georgia Southern's NAACP College Chapter, Jan. 13 in the Williams Center on the GS campus.
The youngest speaker was Youth Council member Langston Johnson, 10, giving the welcome. He first noted the occasion as honoring the legacy of "a visionary leader and a champion of civil rights," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Today we come together as a community to reflect on the progress we've made and the work that still lies ahead of the pursuit of equality and justice," Johnson said.
Youth Council members Kaleb Murphy and Ava Mincey served as the masters of ceremony. Youth Council Vice President Thurgood Johnson and Georgia Southern Chapter Public Relations Chair Taelor Teamer also gave greetings.
Another Youth Council member, Laila Scarborough, introduced Blake Robinson, the university's current Student Government Association president, as keynote speaker. From Valdosta, Robinson, 20, is a senior set to graduate in May with a dual degree in political science and criminal justice.
He serves as Georgia representative to the Student Advisory Board for the Fair Election Center's Campus Vote Project, has completed the university's Southern Leaders Program and currently serves on the Statesboro Youth Commission. Next, he plans to go to law school and to return to Valdosta to practice law and contribute to community development.
Starting his remarks, Robinson noted he had attended the Thursday night dedication ceremony for the Bulloch County lynching history marker beside Statesboro City Hall. The Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition placed the marker in cooperation with the national nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative and Statesboro's city government.
Especially in regard to the marker, one theme Robinson had heard repeated those last few days was "confronting our history brings us forward," he said.
"It brings us forward by recognizing that all of these mistakes that we had in our past, we can acknowledge them, but also need to make sure that we do not repeat them," Robinson said. "And a great man said on that Thursday that America is not America until it is America for all of us."
That was a partial quote from Statesboro Mayor Jonathan McCollar, who Robinson identified as his mentor. The mayor's wife, Adrianne McCollar, and Ogeechee Judicial Circuit Public Defender Renata Newbill-Jallow are the Youth Council's adult advisors. Robinson thanked them. He also thanked his girlfriend, Karmen Lemuel, who helped revise his speech.
At Georgia Southern's own MLK Celebration Breakfast on Friday morning, Robinson had heard another speaker, Terrell Strayhorn, Ph.D., vice provost and interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Union University, talk about building a sense of community in higher education. Shared human experiences unite people, and one of those experiences is grief, he had said.
"We as a people grieve for our ancestors and what they have suffered, and that just made me think, that is what Dr. King is fighting, that is what we are fighting for still today, is to overcome that grief," Robinson said. "That is why we continuously fight on for peace and for love and for justice in our community today."
He spoke frankly of the nine Black men noted on the new marker as having been lynched in Bulloch County from 1886 to 1911, and then of the one horrific lynching, in 1918, infamous from his hometown in Lowndes County.
"Mary Turner, a Black woman, eight months pregnant, was strung up by her feet over the side of a bridge north of Valdosta, Georgia, my home town, by a mob of white men who burned the clothes off her body, cut her baby from her, killed the baby, then shot her to death with hundreds of bullets," he said. "All for the crime of what? She spoke out about her husband being lynched by another white mob."
King heard of such horrors and was "moved to set about changing the realities of the South and to never again see anyone denied justice and equality," said Robinson. He called on other young people "to not be swayed by the daunting task of fixing what is broken" today.
"But we, the younger generations, can fix our broken system," Robinson said. "We can educate ourselves in areas of business, economics and law; we can get elected to our local, state and federal governments. We can build and support Black-owned businesses and Black communities…."
Prayers at the prayer breakfast included the Muslim Salah prayer, shared in an English version by Imam Farid Ansari, and a Jewish prayer for peace delivered by Daniel Skidmore-Hess, as well as Christian prayers. Regina Eason, vocalist, and Venson Moore, keyboard and vocals, performed gospel and praise music to ovations and amens.
Monday's service
Praise music, prayer and, this year, youth leadership were elements that carried over to the Bulloch County NAACP's main Community Service and Celebration, 3 p.m. Monday – after the 2 p.m. parade – at Elm Street Church of God.
Bulloch County NAACP Youth Council President Madison McCollar brought greetings. First Presbyterian Church-Statesboro Pastor Taylor Hartman and Word of God Fellowship Church's the Rev. Frankie Owens gave the opening prayer and invocation, and Elm Street's Pastor, Dr. Alexander Smith, the closing prayer.
The Screven County High School Gospel Choir performed praise and worship music, also to much applause. That choir, like the keynote speaker, Thomas L. James, hails from Sylvania.
Besides being president of the Screven County NAACP Youth Council, James is a member of the City of Victory, Sounds of Praise, where he serves as a lay minister under the leadership of Senior Pastor Nicole E. Peeples.
James is also studying political science at Georgia Southern and aspires to be an attorney. In fact, he holds the Alethia Simmons Law Fellowship at the Davis Bozeman Johnson Law firm, its Statesboro-based partner attorney Francys Johnson, also a minister and originally from Screven County, revealed in his introduction.
"We should not simply pray for our neighbor, we should not simply pray for our community, we should not simply pray for our county, but we must also take action," James exhorted the crowd. "Somewhere I read, 'faith without works is dead.'"
He spoke of "three modern-day injustices" with parallels in Scripture: poverty, the mistreatment of strangers, and prisons.
"I did some digging. In the 2022, 17.1% of Black folk living in the United States were living below the poverty line, compared to 8.6% of white folk," James said.
The total poverty rate across all races was 11.5%.
"I did some more digging," he said, and cited statistics for hate crimes, defining these as "motivated by bias against someone's race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity."
Overall, these had increased 7% in recent years, with Black people still the most frequent targets, he said. But anti-transgender hate crimes had increased 35%, and religiously motivated hate crimes by 27%.
"Contrary to whatever we believe, in the conventions of our faith, we should never treat anybody 'less than,'" he said.
On the subject of prisons, he cited a statistics that Black people make up 61% of incarcerated Georgians, while they are 31% of the state's population.
"I wonder what we will find if we stop being comfortable and stop being complacent with where we are, and yes, we've come a long way, but we still have very long to go," James said.
Parade awards
Also during the community service, the Parade Committee presented float competition prizes and publicly recognized parade Grand Marshal Lashai Campbell, co-founder and executive director of Restoring the Breach Inc., a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Statesboro.
Float contest winners were third-place Salon Ambience & Spa, second-place Georgia Southern University and first-place Original First African Baptist Church. Floats were judged on originality, appeal and how well they illustrated this year's theme, "Thrive: In Movement. In Culture. In Community."
