MLK Storyfest Centers Black History

Through words, music, and movement, storytellers, drummers, and dancers offered dozens of families a chance to find their place in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., the broader causes of social justice he dedicated his life to, and the rich culture he came out of. 

That was all part of the Peabody Museum’s 27th annual celebration of the life of King, held at the New Haven Museum on Sunday and continuing on Monday at the Yale Science Building, all as the Whitney Avenue natural history museum continues to be renovated.

The first storyteller of the day on Sunday was educator Waltrina Kirkland-Mullins, who introduced herself to the crowd before her with a wide smile. ​“I have not been in this building for the last three years,” she said, expressing her gratitude for being able to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once again in person. Her role as a storyteller gave her a chance, too, to reflect on just how much the United States has progressed along Dr. King’s arc of the moral universe.

“This lady has been on earth for a long time,” she said. ​“Long enough to know what it is to go to a restaurant and not be served. Long enough to live in a segregated community” — that is, Harlem, where she grew up, which she described as ​“powerful” and ​“beautiful,” but segregated nonetheless. ​“I’m sitting here and thinking about how far America has come since I was a little girl.”

Kirkland-Mullins related how her parents taught her that ​“everyone was equal” but ​“it was different when I went outside.” A white child pointed our her Blackness in a department store. Even in New York City in the 1950s, precious few social spaces were integrated. Even though the law didn’t demand it, social custom had Black people ride in the back of public buses anyway. In department stores she noticed that all the people at the sales desk and cash register were white, while the custodial staff were Black. 

“Did that happen in the North, too?” she asked. ​“Dr. King and countless numbers of civil rights activists made it possible for us to interact at an event like this. That’s progress.”

She read Langston Hughes’s poem ​“Merry-Go-Round,” taking on the absurdities of segregation, adding that she went to an amusement park in New Jersey as a child and was not allowed to ride certain rides. ​“Could you imagine living like that?” she asked. She then read Arnold Adoff and Emily Arnold McCully’s 1973 book Black Is Brown Is Tan, celebrating interracial families, explaining that ​“this is a book for all families. Love knows no color.” 

Other books, like Margaret H. Mason and Floyd Copoper’s These Hands and Freedom on the Menu, prompted further reflections from Kirkland-Mullins. At diners, ​“I remember having someone not want to serve us and I would have to wait an hour to get served,” she said. ​“That happened in New York City, and Pennsylvania, and D.C. It wasn’t just down South.”

“Can you imagine not being able to go places because of the color of your skin?” she asked. ​“I remember Dr. King making his speeches, and I remember clapping for a long time.” Then, as now, she reacted out of a sense of injustice stemming from a fundamental sense of unfairness that, perhaps ironically, children could often understand better than adults. ​“Sometimes kids have more common sense than the grown-ups,” she said.

After a rousing call-and-response, recently retired probate judge Clifton Graves also explicitly connected past to present, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to New Haven. He began with The Rev. Edwin R. ​“Doc” Edmonds, former pastor at Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC, who died in 2007. Before Edmonds moved to New Haven in 1959, he was a pastor in Greensboro, N.C., where he helped organize a sit-in at a Woolworth’s. His civil rights work and connections to King drew the ire of the Klan, who burned a cross on his lawn; out of concern for his family, he decamped for New Haven. Twenty years later, however, Graves said, he was invited back to Greensboro to commemorate his work, and was greeted by a large, friendly crowd. 

“Black and White stood up and said, ​‘thank you,’ ” Graves said. ​“That’s New Haven history — and American history.” Today, he added, Edmonds’s daughter Toni Walker serves New Haven as state representative, where she is chair of the state legislature’s Appropriations Committee. She ​“oversees the money for everyone,” Graves explained to the children. ​“She’s part of the legacy of her father.”

Graves then related his own connection to King. When he was eight or nine years old, his father explained that they were going to church at night ​“because there was a preacher coming from Georgia that you need to hear,” Graves said. The church was packed with Black and white people alike. ​“The only seat for me was on a piano stool,” he said. He was transfixed by King’s speech. ​“I felt like he was talking to me,” he said. King told the children in attendance that ​“the future is yours, so prepare for it now.” Afterward, ​“my daddy in his wisdom took me to the pulpit to shake the hand of Martin Luther King, Jr. He looked me in the eyes and said, ​‘do well, young man.’ ”

“It continues to inspire and motivate me,” Graves added, to be a part of the work of making ​“America the land it has not yet been, but yet must be.”

Graves then explained the legacy he was a part of, descended from a woman who was kidnapped in Africa, sent across the Atlantic Ocean, and ​“ended up on a slave auction block,” to be purchased by the Lash family, who gave her the name Henrietta. She learned to be a good cook and in time became the head cook for the Lashes. 

“The master’s family ate the best food and the slaves got whatever was left,” Graves said. Except that Henrietta made apple pie every day, and enough ​“so her brothers and sisters could eat the same food. She did this the entire time she was a slave.”

She outlived slavery, living to a ripe old age, and told the story of her secret pie to her niece, who would become Graves’s mother.

“Did you have a name for that pie?” Graves’s mother asked.

“Yeah! I call it the hypocrite pie,” Henrietta said.

“It’s a story about courage,” Graves said. Henrietta was one of so many people ​“who had the courage and perseverance to survive every day.” Her pie was ​“an act of defiance,” risking discovery and punishment because she believed ​“her brothers and sisters deserved to eat the same food.”

On his father’s side, Graves has one of the first Black U.S. deputy marshals as an ancestor; he was stationed in Oklahoma. Graves has a picture of him with his posse, which included a Native American and a white man. As a probate judge, Graves kept the picture on his desk to make sure ​“everybody knows the story.”

“We’re in the same boat but we have different stories,” Graves said, speaking now of all people. ​“All of us came from some struggle,” and those are worthy of being acknowledged. ​“We should be treating each other better than we do.” As ​“people are using skin pigmentation to separate us… we should find ways to come together, as we try to find a way to make this world better for our children.”

Later on in the day, Hanan Hameen’s Dance and Beyond ripped into a drum and dance demonstration that reached deep into the culture and outward toward unity for all. 

It began with drummers wordlessly teaching the audience several rhythm parts, then exulting in the sound that filled the room as a result. 

Children were invited to try several of the West African drums available for them, and slipped into the driving rhythms that the drummers provided. 

Hameen then got everyone on their feet with a dance lesson, explaining the significance of each move. Hands raised and lowered were blessings offered to the sky and earth, and to the ancestors. 

Sideways motions were signs of welcome, of pulling people together. The exercise culminated in an all-out rhythm extravaganza in which anyone who wanted to could try their steps at dancing, which many did, vigorously.

The final storyteller of the day, educator Joy Donaldson, then cut straight to the heart of Sunday’s event. In simple chapters — each chapter headed by the singing of a spiritual — Donaldson told the life story of Martin Luther King, Jr., beginning with his early days as a smart child ​“who skipped two grades” and ​“was only 15 years old when he entered Morehouse College. She talked about his experiences of segregation in the South versus the North; he had to ride in the colored car north to Washington, D.C., and then ​“could sit anywhere he wanted.” Returning home, he reversed the experience. She talked about how the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 – 56 was successful in part because it had been tried before and failed.

“Failure is not always a bad thing,” Donaldson said. ​“Failure is how you can learn what you need to know to be successful.”

She talked about the lessons King articulated while in jail in Birmingham. ​“The greatest obstacle,” she said, to social reforms has been that ​“the good people of the United States stayed silent and did not take action against those who were doing bad.”

“Does that sound familiar?” she added.

She then took listeners through the rest of King’s life, his momentous speeches, and his assassination in Memphis. Looking back on the past five decades since King’s death, Donaldson said that ​“we know that things are better, but we still have a long way to go.” 

And like the previous storytellers, she talked about her own experience of King, watching him on television as a child. She talked about how the cameras could show something of the truth about ​“how people could peacefully march and still be brutalized,” she said. But she also talked about how, when she visited the South as a child, she was told the rules for being subservient to avoid trouble, and she did not like them.

“I was so proud to see Martin Luther King stand up and walk for rights. It was so inspiring, that they had that kind of courage.”

As she dug a little further into her reminiscences, she became cognizant of the time, and she considered the ages of some of the youngest listeners. She only had a few more minutes, and so left with a final pearl: ​“Don’t be afraid of the real history of the United States.”