By Scott Brinton
“We cannot walk alone,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously intoned in his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.”
It seemed only fitting then that a Village of Hempstead-Hofstra University celebration of King’s life and legacy on Monday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, began with a spirited march through the 31-degree weather on Hempstead Turnpike in Hempstead, with dozens of students from the nearby Academy Charter School and Aviation High School in Long Island City filling the parade’s ranks.
The procession, led by Hempstead Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr., began at Hempstead Village Hall and headed a mile and a half east to Hofstra’s Mack Student Center, where more than 200 had assembled to greet the marchers.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome, we are so glad to be able to stand here,” the event’s keynote speaker, the Rev. Curtis Brown, pastor of the Rising Star Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens, told the crowd.
In an emotional, 20-minute speech that can only be described as spiritual, Brown spoke consistently of the need for unity, noting more than once, “Together, we win.”
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