The first marches honoring the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in this city started long before the state legislature declared the day an official holiday. People marched along York Street, which once upon a time, not so long ago, was a dividing line between black and white neighborhoods.
“My father was a state representative and a City Council member, and my parents lived on Race, and the reason they lived on Race was because they could not move east of York,” John Caldwell, son of Elvin Caldwell, tells me as we wait for the Marade to start at City Park on Monday. “This was in 1950.”
Not quite 25 years later and six years after Dr. King was assassinated, a “younger, thinner” then-state Rep. Wellington Webb tried to win passage for a state holiday honoring the civil rights leader.
“I tried in 1974 and it died,” he tells the crowd. “I tried in 1975 and it died. I tried in 1976 and it died. I tried in 1977 and it died.”
It would take his wife, former state Rep. Wilma Webb, to usher in passage. Her bill passed in 1984, and, two years later, she tells me, the first official Marade ended in Lower Downtown with birthday cake. Every year since, the Marade has ended in Civic Center. I can’t say that until Monday, I had given much thought to the route. Though now that I do, it seems as good a metaphor as any for this day.
Start at a park in a neighborhood with houses once off-limits to black families and end on the city’s front porch. It does not hurt that this green is ringed by institutions that stand for justice and fair representation and knowledge and beauty.
I don’t make it to the Marade every year, but when I do, I’m struck by the way it manages to blend the sober and the jubilant. Remember why you’re here, is the admonition of the day; remember what enabled you to be here.
As such, it is not surprising that a few years back, longtime participant Roslyn Washington saw fit to stop four young marchers who declared they were tired as they were about to enter a restaurant along the parade route. “The reason you get to go in there,” she told them, “is right here, in this march.”
At the park, recordings of Dr. King’s words give way to a foot-stomping “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which in turn gives way to Webb recalling a young minister who mesmerized the state House of Representatives in the early ’80s with his testimony in support of the King holiday. “His name was Marvin Booker,” Webb says. Marvin Booker died last year while being restrained by five sheriff’s deputies in the Denver jail.
The black fraternities and sororities are present, including Omega Psi Phi, to which Kirk Dunham belongs. Dunham, a long-time Denver police officer, was born in Chicago in 1950. His wife, Yolanda Walker, was born in 1961 in Louisiana. Both of their parents were born and raised in the Jim Crow South.
Dunham and Walker have three children, and their youngest child, Alexis, just turned 15. She’s a freshman at Bishop Machebeuf High, a private Catholic school. Alexis and her friend and fellow student, Johniece Parker, were the Marade’s excellent mistresses of ceremony.
I’m not sure what I find more remarkable: that what ignorance and impatience allow us to believe happened long ago — the shame of segregation — wasn’t long ago, at all. Or that in the 57 years that separate the birth of Alexis from the birth of her grandfather, James “Dr. Daddio” Walker, so much progress has been made.
I meet two girls at the end of the march. Their names are Destini and Justice. I know. I couldn’t have planned it better. Destini Packer and Justice Gray walking in their first MLK Marade, two seventh-graders with the whole world before them.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
