Staff Photo by Dan Henry/Chattanooga Times Free Press
Baylor School senior classman Mary Mattson Lewis, left, speaks to 5-year-old Precious McClendon during lunch at the Harriet Tubman Housing Development on Monday. Baylor School students and members of the Urban League of Young Professionals cleaned and cooked for the residents Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Day.Retired Chattanooga garbage worker and street cleaner Charles Haywood has marched for 41 years in the Unity Group’s M.L. King Day Memorial March.
“Every one in public works should be here. That’s why the man got killed,” Haywood said referring to Dr. Martin Luther King’s April 1968 assassination. King was killed the day after he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
Haywood, 72, was among hundreds of marchers participating in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Chattanooga.
“If I’m still living, I’ll be here next year, too — rain, sleet or snow,” Haywood said.
King stood at the forefront of the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that led to the end of segregated seating on public buses. He led the March on Washington for civil and economic rights where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.