County celebrates life and mission of Martin Luther King Jr.

EVERETT — Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t die so that young men could sag their pants below their hips, Herman Boone told hundreds of students gathered in downtown Everett on Tuesday afternoon.

“No one is going to invite you in for an interview with your pants way down there,” said the fiery former high school football coach whose tough talk and big heart inspired the film “Remember the Titans” starring two-time Academy Award-­winner Denzel Washington.

King died delivering a universal message of peace and equality, Boone told about 800 students, who turned out for the noontime speech at the Edward D. Hansen Conference Center on Wednesday.

Boone was the keynote speaker of Snohomish County’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, which is usually held the week before the holiday honoring King.

On Thursday, King would have turned 80.

Earlier in the day, Boone spoke to about 1,400 students at Lynnwood High School.

“Celebrate his birthday because it is not a day off,” he said. “It’s a day on.”

Much of Boone’s 45-minute speech focused on personal responsibility and showing respect for others. His speech largely steered away from his personal experience, and instead focused on the life and legacy of King.

He spoke of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” the lessons of Ghandhi’s peaceful resistance and King’s dream that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

In one week, Barack Obama will become the first black president of the United States, an event that many say is the dawn of a post-racial America.

That fact was not lost on event organizers, who said they noticed more excitement in this year’s celebration.

“You can’t get any better timing than on the eve of the inauguration in seven days,” said J.J. Frank, who runs the YMCA of Snohomish County’s Minority Achievers Program.

Boone in 1971 had just taken over as head coach for the newly desegregated T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va. — a city in many respects bitterly divided by race and history.

A clip from the 2000 Disney movie played before Boone spoke. It showed Boone taking his players on a pre-dawn run through a swamp to gravestones at the battlefield of Gettysburg.

Racial tensions on the football team and in the city escalated when Boone, assistant coach of the original T.C. Williams High School, was named head coach of the Titans after three rival high schools were merged. His appointment angered those who favored a local favorite and a successful head coach of an all-white high school.

Washington, as Boone, exhorts his players: “Listen to their souls man. ‘I killed my brother with malice in my heart.’ ‘Hatred destroyed my family.’ Listen. Take a lesson from these men. If we don’t come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed. I don’t care if you like each other, but you will respect each other.”

In real life, Boone said Tuesday, he was angry that his players were still fighting each other over race and old rivalries. He wanted to find a way for the players to respect one another.

He put them on a bus and took them to Gettysburg, where 50,000 men were killed or injured in one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles, and gave them a speech much like the one in the movie — only with expletives, he said.

After that, the team grew to respect each other despite their differences and that respect became the “emotional glue that bound the team and the city” of Alexandria.

The coaches also put aside their prejudices and in doing so helped unite their team, which they led that year to a 13-0 record and a state championship victory.

Ali Al-Ghazali, an Everett High School freshman, said he learned a lot from Boone.

Prior to the speech, Al-Ghazali joined several hundred students in a march through downtown Everett.

The young man recognized that the student march was a far cry from the political and social protests that King helped lead in the 1950s and 1960s.

“We had the streets opened for us,” Al-Ghazali said. “They had hoses opened on them.”

Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.