The Annual St. Clair County Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Unity Breakfast was held last Saturday in Pell City.

Around 200 people gathered at the civic center to join in fellowship and brotherhood and hear inspirational messages brought by several area church and community leaders. The theme of the Unity campaign is “Promoting Unity and Community Awareness.”

The First Missionary Baptist Church of Moody and its youth choir provided musical entertainment during the gathering. The featured speaker was Reverend Vincent Curtis of Moody’s FMBC and he delivered a message of “Closing the Gap” to further achieve the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his speech on the steps Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Dr. King voiced that he hoped that “one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Rev. Curtis said that while that is happening all across this state in 2010, that there are still gaps in education and culture that need to be shored up so that African-American children can take full advantage of every opportunity that exists in this county and in the United States.

After the breakfast, Mistress of Ceremony and Pell City High School Assistant Principal LaToya Orr shared her thoughts on how things went at the 2010 meeting. Orr said the breakfast was “a wonderful opportunity for the community to show that we are a united front throughout the county. Sure, we may have our problems, and we may have our ills like anyone else. But in this community we have such a great support system. You look at the crowd here and you see politicians, educators, retired people, white, black and just a different range of people celebrating the fact that we can accept and love each other and though we might have our differences, underneath it all, we are the same and know that we are living the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King had for us.”

Pastor Donald Gover, a key organizer in the annual meeting said of the meeting, “Everything went lovely in the sense that we are constantly seeing the gap closed. We had a great diversity in our audience this year. There was both a greater diversity and a better attendance, which speaks mostly to the vision of Dr. King about us all coming together. We are constantly seeing that vision coming to fruition and coming to pass. We’re not all the way there, yet. But we’re moving there and that’s the encouraging part. That’s the exciting thing about events like this. We are constantly making progress of closing that gap where we’ve been separated for so long.”