Saturday, March 20, 2010
King bridge as a symbol of the higher road
Organizers of a 20-minute walk want to promote unity and are using the symbolic bridge to help.
Click the button above to see all of our community coverage, or go straight to your community's homepage with the menu below.
More religion stories
- Day of prayer to focus on unity
- Slovak professors bring insight into Communism
- Religion calendar
- Church works hard to achieve simplicity
- Religion calendar
Archive
She remembers a time when her black classmates would badger her for having white friends. So to show her longing for unity, Angela Bennett plans to walk over the railroad tracks that divided the historically black and white sections of town.
Her friends Joe Cobb and Bruce Bryan are making the same plans. They're among the people who have organized a 20-minute walk starting at 3 p.m. March 28, from the O. Winston Link Museum to the Taubman Museum of Art and back across the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge.
"For us to come together, it will make us stronger," said Bennett, who grew up in Northwest Roanoke.
The walk is the latest initiative in a year-old endeavor called Creative Connectors that Roanoke's office of economic development started with some 30 residents -- pastors and business owners among them -- to lead projects for community development, including the bridge walk.
The walk makes a clear use of symbols: Railroad tracks that have brought affluence to the city but divided its people, and a bridge that connected the historically black Gainsboro District with primarily white downtown and Old Southwest.
"Sunday is the most segregated day for worshippers everywhere, so we wanted to create this opportunity for people to walk celebrating our presence together," said Cobb, pastor of Metropolitan Community Church in Southeast Roanoke. "The bridge helps us take the higher road above the things that have served as barriers."
Bryan, who runs a retail advertising company called B2C Enterprises, is one of the coordinators of the event, and he said the walk has been advertised throughout the city via e-mail, radio and church bulletins. Local dignitaries were invited, he said, but the only people who will give speeches will be denizens sharing two- to three-minute stories on how race has affected their lives.
"What we hope may come of it is some connections built, or some relationships rekindled," he said. "There's no agenda. It's not a fundraiser, it's not a political rally."
Bennett, 41, another organizer, said the walk is significant because she sees a similarity in the de facto segregation she experienced as a teenager in the 1980s. As a Patrick Henry High School student, she said she socialized with white friends, but was ostracized in her Northwest neighborhood for doing so.
She said she sees her 20-year-old son, who's studying to be a pharmacist at Virginia Western Community College, going through a similar experience. If she and her son make more connections with people outside their neighborhood, she said, they'll benefit for having a broader network.
"If you don't interact with people different than you, you don't understand that they're also human and have emotions," she said. "That's across the board in terms of gender, orientation and race, and this walk is about us embracing all of those things."
