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U.S. honors, reaffirms King's dream Photo by Bob Pennell Kevin Warren performs "The Right to Dream" in front of a slide show of photos from 1960s civil-rights protests. Warren's presentation was part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at Southern Oregon University Monday. SOU celebration notes lingering effects of racism on American life By BILL VARBLE ASHLAND -- Racial problems are still a scar on American life more than 30 years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, a visiting black studies professor told an overflow crowd at Southern Oregon University's Britt Ballroom Monday. "Think about what kind of country you want to create," urged Darrell Millner, chairman of Portland State University's black studies department. Millner was guest speaker for this year's celebration of the slain civil rights leader's birthday, the 12th at SOU. Jackson County Judge Phil Arnold, who spoke Monday, said that when the first observance was held, he was afraid nobody was going to show up. "We began calling all our friends saying to please come," he said. "We didn't want an empty auditorium." That was in 1989. Monday's crowd filled the ballroom's 700 seats and lined its walls as visitors and locals praised King and the ideals of equality and non-violence. Millner said King's ideals went to the roots of the nation's founding principles. And the racism King fought wasn't confined to the American South, he said. An 1844 Oregon law excluding blacks from homesteading prescribed 39 lashes with a whip for any black person found living in the state, he said. By 1863, a $5 poll tax was in place. Blacks who couldn't pay were put to work for 50 cents a day. A miscegenation law forbidding whites to marry members of other races was passed in 1866. The penalty was one year in jail. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in the state in 1905, and restaurants, movies and trains were largely segregated in Oregon until 1953. Millner In the 1940s, insurance companies charged black drivers more for car insurance, reasoning that if they ever went to trial they would certainly lose, and that they therefore cost more to insure even if they had a good driving record. Blacks in Portland could use certain city parks only on certain days. Millner said King seemed to sense his fate in the spring of 1968 as his attention was drawn to the plight of striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tenn. "I don't want a long funeral," King said just weeks before his death. "Tell them not to talk too long. Tell them Martin Luther King tried to love somebody." Earlier, Ashland High School students sang a spiritual, rapper Aaron Harris and the group To a Higher Consciousness lashed out at racism, and Ashland Schools Superintendent John Daggett said a group of thoughtful citizens could change the world. Alma Rosa Alvarez, an SOU professor, said she had trouble renting a house in Ashland in 1996, an experience she attributed to discrimination. Kevin Warren, of the Seattle-based drama group, Living Voices, presented "The Right to Dream," a powerful montage of spoken dialogue and archival civil rights photos and video. The piece traced the idealism, fear and humanity of a young black man coming of age in Mississippi in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, when civil rights workers were beaten by police and murdered by racists, and activists looked to King for leadership. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA