March on UCI for rights

Cross-Cultural Center hosts series of events in honor of Martin Luther King’s philosophies.UC IRVINE -- Nearly 40 years after his death, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream lives on in Orange County. Just ask Jim Craig.

Each year, UC Irvine’s Cross-Cultural Center holds the Martin Luther King Jr. March, a procession around Ring Road in which participants chant slogans and sing songs championing human rights. Craig, a former assistant vice chancellor of student affairs, hasn’t missed the event in more than two decades.

“It ebbs and flows,” Craig said Thursday morning as he and two dozen others gathered for the walk by the humanities trailers. “Sometimes there’s more passion than other times. When they were protesting apartheid in South Africa, people got more animated.”

And Craig’s main cause for this year?

“I would like to see the U.S. government become more focused on social justice and less on executive power,” he said.

Thursday marked the third and last day of the 22nd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium, a campuswide event featuring workshops and seminars on nonviolence and race relations. The day’s events kicked off at 11:30 a.m. with the march.

This year’s march may have had a small crowd, but it also had an impressive finish. After covering the length of Ring Road, the party returned to the Cross-Cultural Center in time for its official groundbreaking ceremony. This year, as part of a massive renovation of the Student Center, the Cross-Cultural Center will double in size.

The construction vehicles hadn’t arrived on campus yet Thursday -- Cross-Cultural Center director Anna Gonzalez said the work would start within a week -- but UCI still held a gala reception to kick off the new center, with free food, music and speeches.

“The theme of this groundbreaking, and the theme of Dr. King’s legacy, is that there’s no place like home,” said Corina Espinoza, former director of the Cross-Cultural Center.

Social science professor emeritus Joseph White delivered an often fiery speech on race relations in California, trumpeting the state’s rising minority population but stressing that more work needed to be done for equality.

“In this multiethnic state, and multiethnic nation, the Cross-Cultural Center needs to lead the way,” White said. “The dream is not dead. We’ve got to operationalize the dream.”

As it marched around Ring Road, the group’s most notable message centered around business rather than race. A number of service workers on campus, who have campaigned in recent months for higher wages and benefits, carried signs proclaiming “Justice for all UCI workers,” “Fairness not favoritism” and other slogans.

“We think Martin Luther King had a dream,” said Juan Castillo, an organizer for UCI’s service workers union. “The workers from our service unit also have a dream to bring their services in-house.”20060120itdan4ncPHOTOS BY KENT TREPTOW / DAILY PILOT(LA)20060120itdal8ncPHOTOS BY KENT TREPTOW / DAILY PILOT(LA)Above, Lucy Chang of the drumming group Jokaido performs before the groundbreaking ceremony for the Cross-Cultural Center at UC Irvine on Thursday. Below, Anna Gonzalez, the director of the Cross-Cultural Center, speaks to students at the ceremony.