MLK Day motorcade honors civil rights icons and looks toward Louisville's future

Monday morning's motorcade through Louisville was about more than honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

To be sure, city leaders celebrated the iconic national civil rights activist's legacy before the nine-mile ride through Louisville's West End and at a service afterward at King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church.

But the holiday ceremony, according to Bishop Dennis Lyons of Gospel Missionary Church, was also about George Burney, the Louisville civil rights activist who founded the motorcade in the 1970s and kept it going every year until his death in 2017. It was about Mattie Jones, the longtime civil rights leader who still lives in Louisville. The parade passed her house as it wound through the city Monday morning.

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Louisville has a notable place in the history of the civil rights movement — Monday would have marked the 80th birthday of Muhammad Ali, who died in June 2016. But segregation has played a key role in shaping the city, speakers at King Solomon said.

The city's next wave of leaders face an important challenge in helping to bridge that gap, Lyons noted, and many who could be in that group were in the crowd Monday morning.

More than a dozen candidates for office in the 2022 election spoke at the church, including mayoral candidates Craig Greenberg, Bill Dieruf, David Nicholson and Shameka Parrish-Wright (candidate Timothy Findley wrote on Twitter afterward that he had not been made aware of the event).

Mayor Greg Fischer joked that the event was "starting to look like Louisville's Fancy Farm," a nod to the annual Western Kentucky picnic that features rowdy speeches from members of both political parties.

Many of the candidates who spoke are competing for the same job and were addressing individuals who would only have a chance to vote for one of them in the upcoming election. Nearly everyone who took the mic, though, had one similar sentiment – opening up voting access for more people is critical. Legislation that would expand early and mail-in voting as well as give the Justice Department more power to act in oversight of election law changes is up for U.S. Senate consideration Tuesday. But the legislation faces significant hurdles to be passed.

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State Sen. Morgan McGarvey, who's running to take Rep. John Yarmuth's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after the congressman retires at the end of his current term, told people at the event to contact their federal representatives and urge them to back the voting rights legislation.

"If you want people to do something, you make it easier. If you want fewer people to do something, you make it harder. That's what they're doing with voting," McGarvey said. "So today is a day of celebration, today is a day of remembrance. I'm calling on you all to make it a day of action."

While the speeches from political candidates and a performance by local antiviolence and social justice hip hop group The Real Young Prodigy's looked toward the future, the motorcade offered a glimpse of Louisville's past.

Drivers started at King Solomon, in Louisville's California neighborhood, before meeting up with others at the Kroger at Broadway and 28th Street. The route drove through the West End, highlighting activists like Jones and Burney (whose legacy is honored on Hill Street from 22nd Street to Wilson Avenue through "George L. Burney, Sr. Way" signage), and along Ninth Street to show the "Ninth Street Divide" — the unofficial dividing line between east Louisville and west Louisville, where most of the city's predominately Black neighborhoods sit.

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It's an eye-opening drive, Lyons said, to start off an important annual event.

"It brings the community together in solidarity and also it gives the politicians that are in office an opportunity to share their support for the African American community," Lyons said. "It also gives the community an opportunity to see those who are considering serving us."

Correction: This story was updated to reflect which candidates who spoke Monday are running for mayor.

Lucas Aulbach can be reached at laulbach@courier-journal.com, 502-582-4649 or on Twitter @LucasAulbach.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: MLK Day motorcade in Louisville brings out 2022 election candidates