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Photo by Kevin Anderson

Joanne Collins

Bonner Springs — The Martin Luther King Jr. celebration Monday at First Christian Church featured a speaker originally scheduled for the first such event held there 20 years ago.

In 1988, as moderator Nina Kimbrough Smith explained, Kansas City, Mo., City Council member Joanne Collins had been scheduled as the keynote speaker.

The service went on so long that Collins didn't get a chance to speak, Smith said. So 20 years later, Collins, now a former Council member but still an active community leader, mounted the dais 10 minutes before her scheduled time.

Collins began her speech Monday by saying "it's great to be in the hometown" of two of her friends: the man she called "Boss" Tombs and Mayor Clausie Smith.

Like the late Leroy Tombs, Collins said she learned her political skills in her church, which was Zion Church in Rosedale, even though she majored in political science at Kansas University.

Collins attended Sumner High School, which at the time was segregated. Even so, she said, it was a good school.

Collins paid tribute to Coretta Scott King, wife of the civil rights leader Monday's holiday honors.

"If not for Coretta, I don't think he would have seen that mountaintop," Collins said, and Mrs. King helped her husband in his mission, which Collins said "brought humanism to the wounds of America."

"Before Martin Luther King came along, animals were more welcome than black people in some hotels," Collins said.

King believed that suffering - of which where was much in the civil rights struggle, Collins said, including being tear-gassed and shocked with cattle prods by police - intensified the desire for equality and justice in the country.

"He was a drum major for the Lord," Collins said, and "it's up to you and the community" to fulfill the dream.

The program on Monday also included music performances by the Singspiration Musicians and by D'Andre Richardson, praise dancing by God's Precious Angels and a benediction by the Rev. Jesse Milan.