The Rev. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, senior pastor at the Atlanta church home of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., will be keynote speaker at an interfaith service Sept. 24, as part of a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School.
The interfaith service will be a highlight of a series of events set for Sept. 22-25 to commemorate the 1957 integration of Central High by nine black students who became internationally known as the Little Rock Nine.
The service also is to feature comments from members of the Little Rock Nine and performances by the Gloryland Pastor’s Choir and a multicultural choir led by Darius Nelson and Kyle Lin-son, ministers of music at Saint Mark Baptist Church and First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, according to information from a commemoration steering committee.
“We have so much that is going to happen,” the Rev. Frederick Haynes, senior pastor of Liberty Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Little Rock, said during a news conference at Little Rock City Hall on Thursday. “What a great opportunity for us to speak to the nation.”
Warnock has been senior pastor since 2005 at Atlanta’s historic, urban-based ministry of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of King. Warnock is the fifth senior pastor at the church, founded in 1886, and, at age 35, was the youngest to be named to the position.
Warnock delivered the closing prayer at the Inaugural Prayer Service in 2013 at the National Cathedral in Washington for President Barack Obama.
Before joining Ebenezer, Warnock spent six years as youth pastor and four years as assistant pastor at Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and 4 1/2 years as senior pastor at Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church.
As the city prepares for a commemoration of Central High’s integration, a trial over allegations of racial inequities in the Little Rock School District is set for Sept. 13 before U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. A discussion on the present and future state of the Little Rock district was to be discussed Thursday evening in a public forum at the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the state Capitol.
Also, the school district is having to compete with charter schools. Three new open-enrollment charter school plans have received preliminary approval by the state’s Charter Authorizing Panel to operate in Little Rock. Pulaski County is home to half of the state’s 24 charter schools or charter school systems in the state.
The state Board of Education took control of the Little Rock School District in January 2015 because six of its 48 schools were state-labeled as academically distressed. The superintendent was put under the direction of the state Board of Education commissioner and the locally elected school board was disbanded. Three of the six academically distressed schools have been cleared of that label since the state took control of the district.