Mayor Sharon Owens has a busy schedule today, the first time in the city of Syracuse that a Black mayor will help to celebrate the national holiday created in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the cause for which he gave his life.
This morning, Owens will attend the 24th Annual MLK Day of Service and Winter Clothing Drive, coordinated by the Greater Syracuse Labor Council and the United Way of Central New York. At noon, she will be the featured speaker at a musical performance and remembrance to honor King at the Tucker Missionary Baptist Church.
Her message, at the heart of it: Owens has intimate understanding of the power of what King helped to accomplish, knowledge sharpened by the direct impact on her own family. A core part of her calling as mayor, she said, is to continue that motion in this city — she sees the highest potential of the vast Micron plan, whose groundbreaking she attended Friday, as an engine for such progress — and she said it would be contrary to that whole aspiration to allow today “to be just another day on the calendar.”
The late Samuel Woodard, a former Buffalo schoolteacher who is nationally acknowledged as a central player in the original push for a national holiday to honor King, once told me he proposed the idea as a path out of grief and despair after King’s 1968 assassination — believing there always had to be good rising from evil, and believing the ideals King pursued might somehow rise above American anger and division.
All of it, then, achieves a fierce and ongoing imperative, right now. Yet the larger meaning of that notion — the vision of today providing a chance to recommit to a living ideal — was prefaced in an extraordinary and historic way earlier this month, during the mayor’s community inauguration ceremony at the Syracuse Landmark Theater:
If the absolute essence of today’s remembrance is is to celebrate both King and the larger movement for which he sacrificed everything, then maybe no moment in recent civic memory so beautifully encompassed that aching goal as when the mayor’s 82-year-old mother, Rev. Ester Daniels, offered the closing prayer at that inauguration.
Daniels serves as pastor of Jericho Faith Ministries, a church she founded in Geneva, where Owens and her family still go to worship — and where the mayor for years has been an assistant pastor.
Recently, Daniels has endured some struggles with her health. Two months ago, she was not well enough to be at the downtown Palladian Hall, where Owens spoke to a packed Election Day crowd after her mayoral win. Daniels did not feel a whole lot better on the day of the community inauguration, where the mayor hoped her mother could deliver a closing prayer.
Still, there was no way, as Daniels told everyone at the Landmark, that she would not be on that stage.
Even during the ceremony — attended by such officials as Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James — Daniels repeatedly whispered to both Owens and the mayor’s husband, Shaun: Are you sure you want me to do this?
They were emphatic, in response. They were sure. They both knew what was coming. While Daniels sat quietly on stage with head bowed throughout much of the event, Owens understood exactly what was happening: Her mother was listening and thinking and gathering strength to provide a few beautiful and piercing moments of prayer…
The embodiment, really, of what we honor and celebrate today — and then hope to collectively sustain.
“What people heard was the strength of that 19-year-old,” Owens said, referring back to how her mom — as a Florida teenager, raised in the harsh oppression of Jim Crow segregation — climbed on a bus more than 60 years ago and traveled alone to Geneva, where her new life was buoyed by the rising tide of the civil rights movement.
The inauguration began with a performance of African drumming, which Owens saw as a centuries-long statement — despite struggle — of journey, memory and larger kinship. When the mayor’s mother offered her distinct and vibrant prayer of closing, it rose into a memorable “connectivity,” said Bishop H. Bernard Alex of the Victory Temple Fellowship Church, master of ceremonies at the event — and a guy whose own family lived out a parallel story.
He is the son of a longtime custodian at the old Syracuse Museum of Fine Art — a tireless worker who would eventually meet legendary architect I.M. Pei during the shift to the landmark Everson Museum of Art. As a child, Alex lived in the 15th Ward of Syracuse, a neighborhood essentially leveled by the construction of Interstate 81.
His own parents, in a way similar to the family of the mayor, left harsh circumstance in Florida for a 20th century move to Central New York — part of the wave of relocation to the North by millions of Black Americans, a move that became known historically as the “great migration.”
Daniels, too, spent her early years in Florida, a place where everything she did was restricted because she was Black — with dangerous barriers placed around where she could work or go to school or even get a drink of water. After leaving for the North, she raised three children and founded a church in Geneva, watching as the American landscape of opportunity was gradually transformed by the dream envisioned by so many…
The same dream for which King died, and a dream not yet complete.
Daniels broke away from the constraints of what she saw as a child, and now — as Alex said — has lived to see a world in which her daughter attended Syracuse University and went on to become mayor of Syracuse, one of the five largest cities in New York.
Such ascent and such opportunity — as Daniels referenced at the inauguration, in a prayer of unforgettable feeling and power — should be available to every child of the city. Throughout the ceremony, she listened quietly to a chain of prominent speakers. She watched as her daughter publicly stated the oath of office and signed an ancient book containing the signatures of all Syracuse mayors.
At the conclusion — asked by Alex to deliver the closing prayer — Daniels did what the mayor said countless people described in this way, afterward:
“She stole the show.”
To make the point, best to simply offer what Daniels said spontaneously, as transcribed from video:
“I’m not feeling well tonight, but I wouldn’t miss this night,” said Daniels, voice rising in power, with every word. “This is the day that the Lord has made. (We will) rejoice. We’ll love it. We’re lifted up and we’re praising … I pray to God, my heavenly father, that his glory light will shine over this city.
“I pray that he would bless the boys and the little girls who looked up tonight and said: ‘I can do that.’ I pray (for) the young mothers that will say, ‘I remember Sharon and now look where she is.’ I pray that we will in Jesus’ name walk with Sharon, Holy Spirit don’t leave us abandoned … I know you won’t because you never will and you never did.
“I want to thank you for all that you’ve done. I want to thank you for the city of Syracuse. I love you, I praise you, I worship you Lord with all my heart … you are a faithful God and you will not fail us. All we’ve got to do is hold on to your unchanging name.
“I’m not not going to be here long. I just want to tell the Lord, thank you. I just want to say to my God: Oh, yeah. Mama’s proud. (Long applause from the crowd). I won’t forget this night. Hallelujah. Even though I don’t feel good, I feel good enough for this (another roar of laughter and appreciation).
“All these powerful women up here. Much younger than me. Oh, I looked at’m. Oh, they’re doing it. They’re doing it. Nobody’s going to push them aside. Tell you that. Glory to God. I’m going to close but I want to tell you, sharing this spirit with you … don’t leave it. Be ready to fight when you’ve got to fight. Be ready to stand when you’ve got to stand. Oh, the Lord won’t leave you. Glory to god. He’ll be with you like he’s been with me and Sharon. And our family and your family…
“Oh, I’m not the only one that knows about God up here. Glory to God. I’m going to close. I’m going to close. I just want to say, thank you. God bless you.”
The crowd, as she said those last few words, again climbed into emotional and joyous applause. Alex, a bishop of his church — feeling his own family story in everything Daniels said — was particularly struck by how Daniels had prayed for Syracuse, for the entire community.
Never, Alex said, had he been at a governmental ceremony where anything quite “made me feel that way.”
The message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alex said, is “for all people” about the nature of commitment, about the choices we all make each day toward one another, on a living journey. He saw and heard Daniels, in that theater, as a vessel of “connectivity” toward everything that means — a woman whose lonely bus ride remains a symbol, still ongoing, toward the dream.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Sean Kirst: For Dr. King’s Day, a voice of witness and a reminder to ‘stand when you’ve got to stand’
Pastor Ester Daniels, mother of new Mayor Sharon Owens, offered a civic message that is preface to everything we remember today.
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