Speakers talk about the damaging effects of racism, which still hurt today
DOWNTOWN Wilma Ellis was only 9 years old when she came across a momentary brush of segregation so powerful that it had a lasting impact on her perspective of life.
It was the late 1930s and Ellis and her family were on the road en route to Los Angeles from Phoenix when in the middle of the night, they decided to stop at a cafe off the highway.
From the car she watched her mother enter the cafe, only to emerge immediately. Confused, Ellis watched her mother walk to the back of the cafe, where from the back door, an outstretched hand handed the woman the family’s meal in a brown paper bag.
“To this day, I feel it,” Ellis, now the director of the non-profit organization, Women on the Move, said on Monday during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance event in Santa Monica. “To this day, it really challenges my spirit.”
Ellis was one of two keynote speakers during the annual community celebration of King’s legacy, held at the SGI-USA World Headquarters Auditorium on Wilshire Boulevard, her counterpart being husband Firuz Kazemzadeh, a professor emeritus of Russian history at Yale University. In its 23rd year, the event — hosted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Westside Coalition, Santa Monica City Hall, the Santa Monica College Associates and City TV — is considered to be one of the largest of its kind in Southern California, attracting several hundred people every year.
The theme of this year’s event focused on global unity, taking King’s famous words that “We have flown the air like birds, and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”
The cross-cultural and interfaith celebration honoring King, who would’ve turned 79 years old on Jan. 15, featured a performance by a choir from the Understanding Principles for Better Living Church in Los Angeles. A photo of King, appearing in deep thought, loomed overhead during the spirited choral performance, which drew several audience members to their feet, clapping their hands and swinging their heads to the beat.
The changes effected as a result of King’s work and the civil rights movement were reflected in the diverse audience, coming from all walks of life, from the young to the elderly, spanning various races, some even the product of biracial relationships.
The separate keynote addresses by Ellis and Kazemzadeh focused primarily on their experiences with racism and segregation and the impact that King’s message of combating injustice by means of peaceful demonstration had traveled across the globe.
“King’s ideas and feelings were both American and universal,” Kazemzadeh said.
His wife told a first-hand story of being a victim of prejudice during the 1930s and ‘40s. Though she grew up in Arizona and California and not in the south, her brushes with racism were similar to what most experienced.
“Growing up black in those days meant you were in a world within a world,” she said.
Every person who lived through the civil rights movement has a specific moment that stands out, a memory they can’t forget, Ellis said. For her, it was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama that killed four young girls. Two of the victims were the same age as Ellis’ children.
“All my tears, all my anger, all my rage could not help those families that lost their children,” Ellis said.
Born and raised in Moscow, Kazemzadeh told the story of his experiences observing inequality and segregation in the Soviet Union, political dissidents considered enemies of the state being arrested and tortured. Though his family was considered to be safe from persecution, he grew up with many friends and classmates who lost their parents. Kazemzadeh recalled an older friend, a well-known cellist during that time, who was deemed a spy by the government and was arrested and tortured. He later died in the labor camp, Kazemzadeh said.
Those observances of inequality extended to the United States when near the end of World War II, Kazemzadeh enrolled at Stanford University and noticed that there was not a single black student in his classes.
“This is the world I grew up in,” he explained. “There are the experiences that made me relate to Martin Luther King Jr.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 22, 2008. Read the original PDF.