MLK Day speaker: Each person in community has job to do

Each person in the African-American community has a job to do and if everyone gets back to doing those jobs, they will prosper as a people, newly elected City Councilman Travis Darnell said during this morning’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at New Salem Baptist Church.
Darnell, who also teaches eighth grade Louisiana history at Patterson Junior High School, was the guest speaker for the celebration.
The event was sponsored by the Patterson Civic Organization during its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration and March.
The community has to get back to old customs and beliefs, meaning that people need to say and do things to change society without fear of how others may react, Darnell said. Everyone has a job to do in the community, he said. “If we get back to doing our jobs, we will prosper as a people,” Darnell said.
King came to empower people, Darnell said.
Darnell asked people, “what are you going to do to make this community better?” When Darnell looks around in his classroom, seeing products of desegregation it hurts his heart to see students with goals just to be athletes or musicians, he said.
“Athletes, musicians, entertainers do not build societies, they simply entertain them,” Darnell said.
King would bear witness to that statement, Darnell said. “We have to be more than entertainers if we’re going to continue to move upwards and onwards.”
Darnell said one thing that King feared about giving people power during the Civil Rights Movement is what would happen if people resorted to violence.
Darnell asked why people today still have to depend on someone else for a job “to provide the basic things we need.”
And as someone who has studied and teaches history, Darnell said the African-American people’s history does not start with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
That history extends long before the greatness of the Romans and Greeks to the Egyptians, who “was as black as midnight,” Darnell said. He studied Egyptians, a people that built the pyramids considered one of the “wonders of the world,” he said. That accomplishment should tell African-Americans that the things that their ancestors created were so great that they are wonders, Darnell said.
The African-American family needs to be restored, Darnell said. “We need fathers in our homes,” Darnell said. Also, Darnell gets frustrated by seeing “all these old guys” complain about the young people of today and not do anything to mentor those young people, he said. Instead, Darnell challenged the older generation to teach the younger generation “instead of running your mouth,” he said.
This afternoon, the St. Mary Chapter of the NAACP will hold its annual Dr. Martin L. King Jr. celebration. The celebration will begin with a march, followed by a tribute. The march will begin at 2:15 p.m., leaving from Morgan City City Hall, located at 512 First St. and ends at New Zorah Baptist Church, located at 604 Julia St.
The tribute will follow beginning at 3 p.m. at New Zorah Baptist Church.