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Video produced by Multimedia Editor Serafina Frederick / DAYTONA BEACH -- The celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today is more than a national holiday for newly-elected Daytona Beach Mayor Derrick Henry, born May 5, 1969, 13 months after an assassin's bullet cut Dr. King's life short in Memphis, Tenn.
Henry, 43, pays homage to the Civil Rights leaders whose non-violent messages and marches paved the way for a path he now walks, in which he's been given the opportunity to lead this tourist-driven city where blacks before he was born weren't allowed to walk on the hard sands of the World's Most Famous Beach, relegated instead to the designated black beach, Bethune Beach, south of the New Smyrna Beach city limits, a good 30 miles away.
To have King's holiday fall on the same day as President Obama's second inauguration is especially meaningful to Henry, who never had to experience going to a segregated beach or school -- by 1970, all Volusia County public schools were fully integrated in what had been a way of life in the Deep South.
The path of sacrifice is not limited to Dr. King in the shaping of the Daytona Beach native's life. A decade before Henry's birth, his maternal grandfather, Samuel O'Quinn, was shot to death in Centreville, Miss.
O'Quinn, married and father of 11 children, was gunned down Aug. 14, 1959, after returning home from a trip up North where he was working with the NAACP. The murder remains legally unsolved to this day, even though there were connections to the Ku Klux Klan.
It is the personal sacrifices like these passed down through Mayor Henry's family that are far more pronounced than any text book on the history of American civil rights.
Please click the video to see the exclusive interview this afternoon with the mayor in his Daytona Beach on the MLK anniversary.
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