A ‘new song’

After listening to vocal performances by College Place Elementary and Meadowdale Middle School, Myrlie Evers-Williams told more than 300 people at the Lynnwood Convention Center Jan. 15 the children had managed to touch her deeply.

“In the midst of listening to them, observing them, I found myself on the verge of tears,” said the keynote speaker for the 2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. “As I looked at those young people, I went back to my childhood…the young people moved me.”

The civil rights activist, 76, spent two days in Lynnwood. On Jan. 14, she visited with and addressed students at Edmonds Community College.

In her speech, Evers-Williams touched on memories of the 1960s and called the election of Barack Obama a “miracle.”

She cited that day’s report of a U.S. Airways jet’s crash-landing in New York’s Hudson River as an example of a miracle. The key, she said, was preparedness. The pilot, she said, “couldn’t have done that unless he had been well trained and well prepared.”

In the same way, she said, the citizens movement that led to the enactment in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act and the gradual thawing of race relations in America are the result of preparedness.

Civil rights protests, she said, “did not start in 1964,” with the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known march on Washington. Others, including her and her late husband, the assassinated leader Medgar Evers, were part of a chorus of civil rights activists who paved the way. “King said, ‘I never forget I did not do this alone,’” she said.

“I have reached a point when I can say I believe America has seen miracles over these years,” she added.

She said she remembers sitting, stunned, as the general election results came in last Nov. 4.

“I was unable to cease watching,” she said. First, “I was hopeful; then prayerful. It prompted me to place my head in my hands, trembling in warm hands.”

She recalled a 2008 primary campaign rally in Bend, Ore., in which she invited Obama to speak.

“That small city had not seen such a large turnout…more than 5,000 people,” she said.

Obama hadn’t been her first choice for president.

“I will be very honest with you, when the campaign started I was for another candidate,” she said.

As the months wore on, however, she recalled her late husband asking her once, “Myrlie, isn’t there anything you believe strongly enough in that you would stand up and fight?”

Miracles may be happening, she said, but it’s still important to remember that “prejudice and racism did not go away on Nov. 4, it is still something that we must face.”

What’s needed, she said, is not a return to the 1960s but a new approach.

“I said to a friend of mine, ‘I’m a little tired of singing “We Shall Overcome.” I cherish it but I want a new song. I want one that will lift us up every time we hear the music.’”