Community gathers to honor police officers, discuss race issues
Photo by Michael Gutierrez
July 14, 2016
Just over a year ago, people of all races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds gathered in McKinney to share thoughts and protest police brutality amid racial tensions surrounding the pool party that made national headlines.
On Tuesday, community leaders and regular citizens gathered again – this time to remember five police officers who fell victim to those same tensions after a sniper opened fire on white officers on duty at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.
One year later.
“I think what happened with the McKinney pool party, it was easy that if you didn’t identify with that group of teenagers you could just be like, ‘Oh that’s just another issue,’” church creative director Jada Edwards said. “I don’t think it affected everyone as personally. I think what happened with the officers affected a much larger number of people and the reason why it happened, even though it was horrible, it made people start asking more questions than the incidents before hand did.”
Right after the police shootings in Dallas, leaders from One Community Church decided to host an event
“Our main pastor was actually out of the country and he texted me and said, ‘Let’s do something, this is really crazy,’” pastor Matt Anderson said. “We brainstormed who can we get together and started thinking of all the churches we know in the area.”
People from over 15 different churches across Collin County attended the service.
“I was expecting a couple thousand to show up but it grew past that,” Edwards said. “Some churches confirmed to come the day of the event so we weren’t surprised that it was a packed house, but there were even several hundred in the overflow room.”
The service, which lasted from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., consisted of religious speakers, prayer, worship music and a discussion panel.
“I really had no clue what to expect but when I got here,” church attendee Quinton McCright said. “It was very enlightening and very overwhelming as well because of so many people gathered for one purpose. I thought that was very important to have so many different cultures and races all at one place. Everybody received the message differently even though everybody heard the same message.”
Messages of unity, love and peace were shared throughout the evening.
“The message that touched me was when we prayed for one another,” volunteer Otis Grant said. “When we were asked to pray for someone else, a stranger that we didn’t know, about a situation that they may not understand, it really touched my heart. It helped me wake up to the fact that not everyone can understand how I feel but to try to put myself in other people shoes.”
Grant believes this event shouldn’t be a one-time thing.
“This is something that needs to happen quarterly,’” Grant said. “Just multiple churches going from one sanctuary to the next and bring us all together for fellowship with each other, because we can’t have one meeting and expect change. Three months from now maybe we could have another get together similar to what we had today and just pray for one another.”
Community leaders hope that the event on Tuesday will have impacts beyond the church walls.
“Going forward we hope that we’ve began to build a bridge of different races, different ethnicities and different socioeconomic classes in our church and our community,” Anderson said. “Now conversations that were awkward before are little bit easier to have and people will just be able to openly talk. Just one person at a time, we are able to make a difference.”
