Video: ‘The Answer Is You’: NAACP Huntington MLK Program Urges Civic Engagement

HUNTINGTON, NY — Bethel A.M.E. Church in Huntington was filled Monday evening as community members, clergy, local officials, and longtime civil rights advocates gathered for the NAACP Huntington Branch’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration, an annual observance that blended worship, music, and a call for civic engagement amid national unease.

The keynote address was delivered by civil rights attorney Frederick Brewington, who framed his remarks as a wide-ranging reflection on Dr. King’s life and the responsibilities King’s legacy places on the present.

“By the time Dr. King had reached his 39th birthday, he had made an indelible mark on the world — not just Birmingham, Selma, or Washington, but the entire globe. He could sit with kings and queens, presidents and senators, and make them listen.”

Brewington walked the audience through King’s background, including academic achievements, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the reality that King was repeatedly arrested.

“When we see a rap sheet of 29 arrests, we need to pray — but we also need to ask what kind of laws make justice itself illegal," he said.

Brewington connected King’s warnings about injustice to present-day realities, citing King’s identification of what he called a “three-pronged sickness” — racism, economic exploitation, and militarism saying those same forces remain active and interconnected today.

“We’re sick right now,” he said. “Dr. King would tell us that God wants a 'yes' — a 'yes' to standing with people who are being victimized, a 'yes' to recognizing what is happening right in front of us.”

Brewington made multiple specific claims about national immigration enforcement and political planning. He referred repeatedly to ICE and portrayed the agency as operating outside the boundaries of normal policing and aggressive practices.

“ICE is not police,” he told the audience. “ICE is a marauding group of individuals who mostly have 47 days of training, who’ve been given guns, wearing masks, and claiming that they are going after the worst of the worst.”

Brewington used historical imagery to argue that what he calls intimidation tactics, change in form but not in purpose, encouraging attendees to take action.

“Since we’ve seen it before, we shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Mask people who would come into the community fearless because they knew they had nobody to fear. Burn crosses and lynch people. Come out of the comfort of the TV and get to a place where Dr. King said that you need to have a place where you’re making people itch, where they can’t scratch. The answer is you. It doesn’t make a difference who you are or what you look like, because we’re here together on this ship called America.”