For the 14th year, Revitalizing Our Community held its annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration Monday. And for the second year in a row, dozens made the march from the MLK Plaza at the intersection of Commerce and Austin to the Bennie Houston Center at 505 Cordell ahead of the program.

This year’s keynote speaker was 46-year-old Mitchell Jordan, the first African-American mayor of Palestine, TX, who was voted to his second term in 2025. Jordan’s message was regarding love and sacrifice.

Regarding the love and sacrifice shown by Dr. King, Jordan said, “Civil rights is not a black thing, it’s a not a brown thing, it’s a people thing. It’s what Dr. King loved, what he fought for, what he believed in, as well as what he died for.”

Jordan urged thus in attendance, especially the younger attendees, to study history and learn from it.

“As history goes on, we sometimes forget why we do what we do, why we are meeting here, why it’s so important for us to march,” Jordan said. “Because if you do not know you’re history, you’re doomed to repeat it. We have to understand why 97 years after his birth we’re still recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, why it’s so important to accept everyone. Diversity is the key. Sixty or 70 years ago we couldn’t have all sit here in this room together, so this is how far we’ve come. We have come a long way, but if we don’t understand where we came from, it is so easy to go back to that.”

Jordan referenced Dr. King’s “I have been to the mountaintop” speech, stating, “It was never meant for us to be on the mountaintop because once you are you can’t go any farther. It was always meant for us to strive for the top – to climb, to sacrifice, to want to love the fact that you want to get to the top. But don’t love without sacrifice, cause there’s no sacrifice without love. We have to understand love is not a color, it’s never been a color, love has always been an action, sacrifice is an action.”

Brownwood Mayor Stephen Haynes also spoke, and provided a “slightly modified” version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, based on today’s climate.

“Two hundred fifty years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceded in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Haynes said. “Now we’re engaged in a battle for civil rights, equality, and respect, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can endure. We’re meeting today to remember all the martyrs who gave their lives fighting for freedom and equality, including and especially Dr. King … It is for us the living to be dedicated here for the unfinished work for which they fought and so nobly advanced … that we highly resolve than these dead shall not have died in vein, and that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that the government of the people, and by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Also during the event, ROC President and City of Brownwood Councilmember Draco Miller shared some of the details of the Bennie Houston Center renovations with those in attendance. Renderings of what the center will look like in the future were also on display, with more details to be shared by Mayor Haynes Friday at the State of the City Address.

Brown County Justice of Peace for Precinct 2 Harold Hogan served as the emcee for the event, while Rev. Eric Jordan with Breath of Praise Church provided the invocation and the benediction came from HPU President Dr. Cory Hines benediction.

In between, Gene Galloway and Vic Cooper each played the keyboard and sang a song, the Brownwood High School band performed the Star Spangled Banner and Amazing Grace, and the Rev. Ernest Kirk was recognized for his decades of contributions to the community, as he then performed a short, impromptu song to a standing ovation.