Jan. 15: South Snohomish County civic leader Wally Webster to be featured storyteller at 6th annual MLK Jr. Tribute

Edmonds-based Lift Every Voice Legacy (LEVL) has announced that longtime and honored South Snohomish County civic leader and community engagement activist Wallace “Wally” Webster II, will be the featured storyteller in the “Reclaim the Dream” 6th Annual Tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – Inspiring a Beloved Community in Song, Spoken Word and Dance at 6 p.m. Monday, Jan. 15,  at the Edmonds Waterfront Center. 

The event is produced in partnership with the Edmonds Waterfront Center and with major funding from the Hazel Miller Foundation. General admission tickets are $15. Tickets can be purchased through Eventbrite.

A Beloved Community – Morning Program for children and families will take place from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. also on Jan. 15 at the Edmonds Waterfront Center. Admission to the morning program is free and will feature local performers in addition to activities specially designed for children and families. Last January’s morning event saw more than 750 participants. 

Both morning and evening programs are designed by the nonprofit LEVL team to inspire Dr. King’s vision of a Beloved Community – a local living environment free of hatred, injustice, and poverty.

According to the LEVL announcement, Webster’s personal story of “Reclaim the Dream” became embedded deep in his soul at a very young age. “I was a 9-year-old boy in Alabama when Emmett Till was murdered in a racist attack August 1955 in Money, Mississippi,” the retired Bank of America executive said. “It shocked the nation and traumatized the community where I lived just 70 miles away.” The longtime community activist and leader has since dedicated more than 40 years of his life elevating the quality of life of marginalized communities and building bridges between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

Webster, the 2023 recipient of the Snohomish County NAACP Carl Gipson Lifetime Achievement Award, currently serves on the Edmonds College Board of Trustees; the Lynnwood Public Facility District Board of Directors and is a member of the Snohomish County Multiple Agency Response Team (SMART). He is also a founding voice of ACCESS (Association of Collective Community Engagement for Safety and Security), a nonprofit recently created to address some of the root causes of youth violence, as well as fill gaps in how it is handled. 

Webster also serves as board treasurer for the nonprofit My Neighborhood News Network, which includes digital publications Lynnwood Today, My Edmonds News and MLTnews.

For the sixth straight year, the evening program will feature returning performances by Pacific Northwest renowned gospel, R&B and jazz vocalist Josephine Howell and her band. Richard Taylor Jr., an Edmonds author, mental health advocate and national speaker, will again serve as a co-host of the event. The Greater Everett MLK Celebration Ensemble also will be featured in the program with special opening and closing performances. 

Donnie Griffin, LEVL’s founder and president, calls this year’s event “an examination of hate versus love and how we are personally affected by both. Our inspiration comes from Dr. King, who said:‘By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; love creates and builds up.’ We can never lose focus of this higher goal of ‘love creates’ and our program is designed to lift that value up in song, storytelling, and dance,” Griffin said.

“It is a message we need right now as hate is increasingly showing its ugly face and destructive ways in churches, synagogues, mosques, airplanes, schools, social media and in public gatherings usually associated with fun and celebrations,” Griffin added. “As Dr. King has taught us, ‘Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.’”