A day of selfless service
At age 89, Harris Wofford is no stranger to large crowds of idealists working to change the status quo. He was a good friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helped found the Peace Corps, and was a civil rights pioneer.
At age 89, Harris Wofford is no stranger to large crowds of idealists working to change the status quo. He was a good friend of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helped found the Peace Corps, and was a civil rights pioneer.
And yet, Pennsylvania's liberal statesman was inspired Monday, two generations later, as he looked upon several thousand people gathered at Girard College for the Martin Luther King Day of Service, which Wofford had helped found several decades after King's assassination.
"The beauty of this room is you," the former senator said from a lectern, flanked by Gov. Wolf, Mayor Kenney, and other public officials and ordinary citizens. "It's this extraordinary assembly."
Drawing more than 140,000 volunteers out of their homes on a federal holiday to donate sweat equity across the region Monday, the 21st annual King Day of Service shattered prior attendance records, according to event organizer and founder Todd Bernstein, a onetime Wofford aide.
The armory at Girard College, where Wofford and others gathered for a kickoff ceremony, was one of many locations across Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey where volunteers took part in 1,800 projects.
All were paying tribute to King's dream of serving others; of Americans helping Americans; of seeking to lift each other out of poverty, racism, or the loss of hope.
"Martin Luther King, like Gandhi, said the other side of the coin of nonviolent civil disobedience is constructive service," Wofford said. "We best know about civil disobedience in the struggle that Martin Luther King led. But that other side of the coin is embodied here."
Organizers chose the theme of justice for this year's day of service, partly to mark the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. The decision by Rosa Parks to be arrested rather than take a seat in the back of a bus helped spark one of the civil rights movement's greatest early mass desegregation actions.
More than a decade later, the protests made their way to Girard College. In 1965, King stood outside its foreboding walls to agitate for an end to policies that kept the boarding school off limits to African Americans.
"This was the site of a real struggle in the civil rights movement," said Clarence Armbrister, an African American who is president of Girard College.
It would be inaccurate to use the past tense to describe poverty and racism today, speakers noted. Even Kenney used his time at the lectern to underscore the work that must be done for Philadelphia to live up to King's vision of an enlightened society, and to Kenney's own Jesuit views of a populace in service to each other.
"We have a lot of problems in our city, and we need to fix them: education, police-community relations, incarceration, homelessness, jobs, fair-paying jobs," Kenney said. "When I look down onto this diverse group of beautiful faces and smiles, I know that all of us working together can make that happen."
King possessed boundless courage and love, Kenney said, which "allowed him to face evil and to lose his life for us."
Such sacrifice is not what is called for if people want to live day-to-day life in the spirit of King, Kenney said. Instead, he said, people should make an effort to care for and love one another - "to have each others' backs, to pick each other up, and treat each other with respect and dignity."
That was exactly what was unfolding at one of the many tables set up inside the armory. The surface was covered with pamphlets about a new law taking effect in March that will substantially bar hiring discrimination against people with criminal records.
Jesse Thompson helped himself to a few leaflets and talked to the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations official staffing the station.
The 33-year-old man - a recently released inmate who started his own company, Superb Cleaning, a month after finishing a 10-year jail term in April - was happy to learn that he will not be able to ask on a hiring application whether a job candidate has a criminal record.
The new law prohibits such an inquiry until at least a job offer has been made.
"That's great," Thompson said. "It will give people future opportunities."
That and other enhancements to the city's previous ex-offender employment law will go into effect March 14.
In his own prepared remarks just minutes earlier, Pennsylvania's first-term Democratic governor called for a society in which all people are equal.
"We need to heed his exhortation to pursue fairness and equity," Wolf said of King.
As night fell, Kenney added one more message to the day. At the Arch Street Methodist Church, across from City Hall, he addressed a gathering of clergy and lay leaders from the interfaith organization POWER.
Kenney reiterated his position that the recent shooting of a city police officer by an Islamic fanatic was the work of a criminal and not a function of the man's faith. He urged his listeners to stand against those who would paint believers in Islam as terrorists.
"We have to fight that and stand up against that," Kenney said.
215-854-2431@Panaritism
Staff writer Chris Hepp contributed to this article.