Parade grand marshals provide service in mold of MLK

When it came time to choose the 31st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade grand marshals, the selection of both the Rev. Marion Bennett and Lillian McMorris was simple for parade president Wendell Williams.

Since 1982, Williams and a selection committee have chosen a male and female grand marshal that best represent King’s values of community service and unity. Each year the grand marshals ride in the parade – which will weave through an estimated 40,000 spectators Monday - as the ceremonial guests of honor.

The selection of Bennett and McMorris were long overdue, Williams said.

“These two people most exemplify what we are looking for in grand marshals,” Williams said. “… They’re both are involved in the entire community.”

When the 10 a.m. festivities kick off, both Bennett and McMorris will ride through a parade on a holiday that Williams said represents a day of duty to one’s community rather than a day off. He feels both grand marshals represent King’s beliefs, and both have left a large imprint on Las Vegas.

Williams said Bennett represented the “no non-sense service” King was known for. Bennett has been serving the Las Vegas community since 1960; he worked as the pastor of Zion United Methodist Church until 2003.

Bennett also spent three terms as president of the Las Vegas NAACP, served in the Nevada Legislature for a decade and founded a low-cost African American daycare facility. Williams said Bennett’s true impact on the community, however, would be felt in years to come.

“He’s done so much to plant seeds in community,” Williams said. “…His work will show what he’s been about and has given.”

He has been so entrenched in the Las Vegas community that Williams assumed Bennett already had served as grand marshal. In fact, his daughter, Judge Karen Bennett had even been selected for the honor in the past. When parade organizers realized Bennett hadn’t been selected, it didn’t even require a vote.

“Nobody in the (selection committee) could believe we had overlooked him,” Williams said. “It was an oversight we were glad to overcorrect.”

McMorris had been involved in the parade from the beginning, when it was no longer than a funeral procession and lasted just 30 minutes. Now it is one of the largest parades in Nevada. She has helped with planning, handled media relations, hosted the cable parade show, and done pretty much anything else Williams has needed.

Growing up with a deacon father and a missionary mother in West Sahara, helping others is the only way McMorris has ever known. She has donated most of her life works to charity and community efforts.

Her impact ranged from producing and directing the KVVU-Fox5 public affairs show “A.M. Southern Nevada” highlighting charity efforts throughout Las Vegas to advocacy work for various charities. She said she’s so busy with community efforts most people are baffled at how she juggles her schedule.

The nation’s first African-American president, taking his ceremonial oath of office on the official birthday of the late Martin Luther King Jr., juxtaposed the nation’s Founding Fathers, the civil rights battles of the 1960s and this era’s drive for equal rights for gays and lesbians in a speech that was short in length and long on ambition.

The president wove familiar campaign themes into an address about governance, including support for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; alternative energy sources and climate-change science; immigration reform; gun control measures; and a foreign policy that promotes international alliances as well as the “strength of arms and rule of law.”

The White House said Obama will detail his agenda Feb. 12 during his State of the Union address, and wants the two speeches to be examined as a pair.

Tutored by historians that second terms can be drained of clout long before they run out of time -- and are often marred by unscripted dramas -- the president urged action, speed, “common purpose,” and sufficient courage to take risks that affirm American values.

“We have always understood that when times change, so must we,” he said. The American “truths” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- and the belief that all men are created equal -- “may be self-evident [but] they have never been self-executing,” he added.

Obama included a reference to the 1969 riots at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, which helped spark a decades-long gay rights movement after police raided a well-known gay bar. By including Stonewall in his rhetoric, the president elevated equal rights for LGBT Americans to a place of historical importance with the women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, and the 1965 march for racial equality from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

On Jan. 18, the administration hosted an all-day pre-inaugural policy briefing for the LGBT community and donors from the gay community, held at the Commerce Department. Federal officials reviewed Obama’s achievements and policy ambitions deemed of interest to that constituency, including progress on health care issues such as HIV/AIDS. Other similar policy briefings for constituent groups took place in advance of Monday’s inauguration, as the White House got a head start on mobilizing supporters to promote Obama’s legislative initiatives.

The president’s 15-minute address was chock-full of references to the middle class, seniors, teachers, women, young people, immigrants, African-Americans, and gays -- in other words, the political base and the voters who made his second term possible. In the mold of Abraham Lincoln and King, the president used his speech to present himself as a leader determined to work for them -- to leave behind a stronger, more just and mightier country.

Although many Obama advisers have sounded upbeat about enacting immigration reform, they have not been as confident about reviving gun control measures, with the exception of universal background checks, which Congress may adopt. White House aides have sounded even less gung-ho about Congress’s willingness to tackle climate change. Even outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said Obama would likely use his executive authority in his second term, because legislation seems like such a long shot.

Nonetheless, Obama devoted a large chunk of his address to energy and climate science, going so far as to appeal to conservative evangelicals, who support some environmental protections as a form of stewardship of God’s creation.

“The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it,” he said. “We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries -- we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure. . . . That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.”

The president challenged his Republican congressional opponents to move quickly in helping him to address the nation’s problems. And he was pointed in his denunciations of positions the GOP -- most prominently Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan -- voiced during last year’s election.