In this man’s heart, Martin Luther King Jr. lives

EVERETT — Reginald Gillins is in a hurry.

He’s scheduled to speak to a crowd in downtown Everett in a matter of minutes.

The Everett man has forgotten something important — a copy of a speech.

Gillins, raised in a rough Los Angeles neighborhood, came to Everett 14 years ago to give his children a better life. He describes himself as just a regular guy, a dad, an employee.

He knows this speech down to the very marrow of his bones. He has recited it dozens of times. After all these years, its message remains as relevant as the first time he heard it.

Still, there’s something comforting about those powerful words at the tips of his fingers.

He finally gets a copy, climbs in his car and zooms toward downtown.

A decision every morning

Some kids count sheep to get to sleep at night. As a child, Reginald Gillins counted how many police helicopter spotlights shined in his window.

Gillins, now 49, grew up in Pacoima, a primarily black neighborhood in Los Angeles.

His parents could have afforded a solid middle-class home in the suburbs; they weren’t allowed to settle there. He spent his early days dodging gang members. “Every morning, I had to make a decision about which way to go,” he says.

As a junior high school student, he met the first of several people who kept him on the right path: Sarah Rosenberg, a drama and English teacher. It didn’t take her long to unearth a special talent of Reginald’s — public speaking.

“I just had a natural gift and talent,” he says. “I won a lot of competitions and I knew then I wanted to be an actor like James Earl Jones.”

Later, Gillins auditioned for the prestigious California Institute of the Arts and was accepted. His father, however, insisted he choose a more practical career. So he became an accountant and pursued acting at night, performing in local theater and finding bit parts on television.

“I really wanted to be a performing artist and change the world with my voice,” he says.

He would — but not in the ways he expected.

Changing the world

In 1982, at age 22, the record company Motown offered Gillins a part performing in a traveling production.

Gillins, who had just met a young woman named Winifred, turned it down. They married in 1986.

“We knew we were going to change the world,” he says.

Those first years of marriage, they gathered a group of kindred spirits and traveled to the worst neighborhoods. There, they’d put on impromptu performances, using humor to draw crowds and then distribute food and clothes.

By then, he and his wife had settled in Santa Clarita, then a safe suburb of Los Angeles. In the matter of a few short years, gang violence bled into that community, too.

In 1992, Gillins was working as a computer operations supervisor in a Los Angeles office when thousands of people began rioting. A jury had just acquitted four police officers of beating of Rodney King.

Gillins found himself explaining to his co-workers how the riot reflected something deeper that had been going on for years: racial profiling, police beatings and friends dying at the hands of law enforcement.

After the riots subsided, he and his friends tried to do what nobody else was doing: broker a peace between the gangs and talk to schoolchildren about what happened. They started a mentor program that matched young men with older men in the community.

Still, he and his wife began to feel as if they were living in the middle of a war zone. They decided to relocate to the Northwest in 1996. She’s now a school principal in Mount Vernon and he works for a major corporation.

Prejudice exists here, too, but it takes a different, less obvious form, he says. People are polite and respectful and the area doesn’t seem to have the problem of racial profiling he saw in California.

“It’s a sticky subject to discuss,” he says. “People have their own misgivings and fears and inhibitions if they’re brown or black or yellow or green. There’s something inside us that fears the unknown.”

The speech

When Reginald Gillins was 9, he had a friend named Jimmy. One day his friend told Reginald he couldn’t play with him anymore because Reginald was black. It crushed Reginald. He talked to his father about what happened. His father explained about this preacher on television named Martin Luther King Jr. and how what he was doing was working to offset those prejudices.

“That really shaped me,” Gillins said Tuesday. “I want to be like him, I want to be a fighter like Dr. King. I want to help people like Jimmy realize black people are just as good as anybody else.”

One of the first things his childhood drama teacher slipped into his hands was King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. It became a signature piece for Gillins, one he performed because he could use his voice, his life, his talents the same way King did.

It’s the speech Gillins delivered Tuesday in downtown Everett. For a few minutes, it was as if King were present. Gillins took on the rhythm and cadence of King’s voice and even his mannerisms. It boomed across the courtyard, as if the words had to reach thousands, not dozens. The speech rose to a crescendo: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last,” and Dr. King is pointing again and again into the gathered people.

Then Gillins slips out of character and he leaves with this message: Be a part of the community. Do what it takes.

More events

Everett held events to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Tuesday. Other events scheduled: