Kenyona “Sunny” Matthews, standing on someone’s back porch in North Hill, looked out across a crowd of about 300 who had come to rally in support of refugees Saturday and offered proof that people’s hearts can change.
The deputy service bailiff for the city of Akron grew up in North Carolina. When she was about 7 years old, a group of immigrants moved into her community and built a Buddhist temple in the woods where she and other children played, she said.
Matthews, who is black, and her friends taunted the newcomers daily, she said, feeling unwanted outsiders had invaded their space.
One day, Matthews fell into a lake by the woods. She didn’t know how to swim and a Buddhist monk in orange robes pulled her to safety. As she sputtered her thank-yous and apologies, she said the monk made a simple request: “Could you leave us alone, now?”
Years passed and when Matthews went to a nearby college, she got involved helping immigrants. She helped teach the monk who had pulled her from the water more than a decade before how to read English.
“It was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I learned it,” Matthews said. “We as a nation need to learn that lesson.”
The Akron Peace March for Refugees left from Patterson Park about 5:30 p.m. Saturday, walking southwest along Cuyahoga Falls Avenue where refugees — many Bhutanese — have brought new life to a struggling neighborhood built by European immigrants decades before.
The group was a mix of young and old, families, activists and churchgoers, all there to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing a travel ban on people from seven majority-Muslim countries and all refugees.
A federal judge blocked the order, which Trump signed Jan. 27. But even as Akronites were expressing their love and welcome of immigrants and refugees, the U.S. Department of Justice was trying to have the court order overturned.
“No hate, no fear, ref-u-gees are welcome here,” the group shouted in the cold as it passed Nepali Kitchen serving steaming bowls of Thukpa soup with goat and Nepali-style noodles. They passed Namaste Market, which sells jars of spicy chutney and jackfruit, and the Himalayan Bazaar, where immigrants can buy bright silk saris and silver jewelry.
Just after the crowd turned south on North Main Street, 8-year-old Reed McCullough’s shoe came untied. Her dad, Ian, paused on a curb to fix it.
“I wanted to come to the protest because I think all refugees should be respected no matter where they come from,” Reed said, dressed in a winter coat covered with hearts.
Ian McCullough said he had not been politically active in recent years, but Trump’s immigration order — which McCullough called “grotesque and offensive” — lit a fire in him.
McCullough is a science librarian at the University of Akron, where nearly 1,400 international and permanent resident status students attend. Eighty-eight of those students are from the seven countries affected by Trump’s travel ban.
“The ban weakens us morally, economically and intellectually,” McCullough said.
A couple of blocks away — in a gravel lot across from The Office bar on North Main — Akron bailiff Matthews had finished her story about the monk. Immigrants — including refugees and slaves who had no choice — built the U.S., Matthews said.
“They are you,” she said. “And we are them.”
As Matthews stepped away from the microphone, and before the next speaker — the daughter of a Palestinian and a Mexican — arrived, a new sentiment rose from the crowd.
“This,” they chanted, “is what democracy looks like.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.