This is the story of a man who wanted more for San Antonio’s East Side. Another East Side native-turned-activist agreed and later used the pressure of football to get state lawmakers to recognize MLK Day as a state holiday.
A reverend moved to march
“The march actually started in 1968. There were a handful of us,” Arlington Callies said. “I was only nine years old at the time.”
Callies' father, Reverend Raymond A. Callies, Sr., is credited with starting the Martin Luther King Jr. Day March in San Antonio that draws hundreds of thousands of people to the East Side today.
“He was moved to march because of a lot of the deficiencies that we didn’t have on the East Side,” Callies said. “Things that a lot of people will probably think, ‘that’s nothing.' But it was a lot back then, such as poor drainage, no sidewalks, no city parks for our youth.”
Callies, Sr., who died in 2011, worked as a woodshop teacher at Martin Luther King Middle School in the San Antonio Independent School District for over 30 years.
He was an activist and pastor of two churches, which he built with his own hands.
“It was his major, something he loved to do,” Callies said.
Callies estimates that nine people marched in San Antonio that first year back in 1968.
By the mid-1970s, it had grown to a few dozen participants.
“We had the police officer on the motorcycle in the front and a police officer in a motorcycle in the back,” Callies remembers. “They gave us just the right lane only, and cars continue to pass in the opposite direction. And we marched on Martin Luther King Drive, but it wasn’t Martin Luther King at the time.”
Callies, Sr., pushed city leaders to change the name of Nebraska Street to Martin Luther King Drive, and they did.
San Antonio creates an MLK Commission
In 1986, the City of San Antonio did something else that would change the local MLK March forever under the leadership of Mayor Henry Cisneros.
“He had been to Atlanta for the very first official Martin Luther King celebration,” Aaronetta Pierce said. “He said he sat there and thought, ‘I want this for my city.’”
Cisneros tapped Pierce to chair the city’s first-ever MLK Commission.
“He really understood that I would give it the work. I would do the work. And it was a lot of work,” Pierce said. “And also, it was a time when people were looking, I think, for more African-Americans to be involved. And that was me.”
By that time, Pierce, a former SAISD teacher, had become an advocate for the arts in San Antonio.
Pierce and Reverend Callies once taught at Martin Luther King Middle School simultaneously.
“I knew what Reverend Callies had been trying to do,” she said. “I call him probably the greatest cheerleader that Martin Luther King has ever had in San Antonio.”
The first MLK March, backed by the city’s commission, took place in 1987.
“I think that what the commission did, we gave it structure. We gave it visibility,” Pierce said.
The city’s support added funding and resources and, through the collaboration of multiple committees, new ideas.
Pierce said she remembers attending a transportation committee for the 1987 march when the name of civil rights icon Rosa Parks came up.
“I said, ‘You know, she’s still alive. We could bring her here,‘” Pierce said.
Through city contacts, they reached out to Parks and invited her to the march.
Parks accepted.
Pierce said she began visiting local churches to spread the word and, she hoped, to give people ownership of the importance of their involvement.
“I said, ‘Rosa Parks is coming. We cannot let Rosa walk alone,’” Pierce remembers.
The commission also added multiple events leading up to the march that celebrated the life of King.
The threat of football moves the state to act
That first commission-backed march in 1987 happened five years before Texas recognized Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday, though it had already happened at the federal level.
Mario Salas — a local activist, East Side native, and current UTSA professor — was part of the group Frontline 2000 that pushed state lawmakers to act.
Years earlier, after participating in other marches for King, he joined Reverend Callies' march.
Salas said a fellow activist came up with an idea he was sure would apply enough pressure at the state level.
“His simple, simple answer was: we’re gonna take away their football,” said Salas.
In 1990, the NFL moved the Super Bowl out of Tempe, Arizona, where it was scheduled to be played in 1993 because Arizona state lawmakers voted against making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a state holiday.
“So, we decided to call the NFL Commissioner,” Salas said. “We got him on the phone. We also called the NFL Players Association.”
After their conversation, Salas said the association’s president told his group they wouldn’t play in Texas, either.
That’s when Salas and fellow activists decided to go to Austin to meet with the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.
“He just said, ‘Well, what do you want? I said, ’Well, it’s what you want, Mr. Speaker. You want a Super Bowl in Texas,‘” Salas recalls.
Salas said he told the speaker, “Football is a big thing here, and without the Super Bowl, what would Texas look like? Well, there won’t be one here unless we get a Martin Luther King State holiday. It’s that simple.”
Salas told the commissioner all they wanted was for the legislation that paved the way for a state holiday, which had already been filed, to be brought up for a full vote.
The speaker agreed, and that bill was on the congressional calendar the following day.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a state holiday in Texas in 1991.
Largest march in the nation
There is no official recording of which city hosts the nation’s largest MLK March, but San Antonio took that title somewhere along the way.
“It’s amazing how San Antonio, we’re just known for it,” said Dwayne Robinson, 2025 Chairman of the MLK Commission.
One year, a march marshal estimated the crowd topped 300,000 people.
“I think it speaks about the city and its uniqueness, its diversity of cultures. And we all have a tendency to get along,” Callies said. “I mean, it’s not a perfect city. No place is perfect. I get that. But San Antonio just has created an environment, if I may, where people feel welcome here.”
Callies said his father’s most treasured achievement was leading the charge to erect a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in San Antonio, which stands in MLK Plaza on North New Braunfels Avenue. However, the march is perhaps the most well-known part of the legacy of Callies, Sr.
“You would think that out of 300,000 people, 200,000 of them were African-Americans,” said Robinson. “And that’s just not the case. The diversity is something that you can only be here to experience.”
The San Antonio Police Department gives the MLK Commission a yearly crowd size estimate.
No matter what’s changed in size or planning over the years, organizers never wanted the event to be a parade.
“We always like to respectfully draw a distinction between us and Atlanta, [King’s] hometown,” said Robinson. “Atlanta has a parade, and we have a march.”
“Martin Luther King didn’t parade. He was a marcher,” Salas said. “He once said, ‘There’s nothing stronger than the sound of marching feet, of a people determined to change things.’”
“We march for a cause,” Callies said. “My reason would be not to forget where we came from. Not to forget whose shoulder we stand upon. Not to get complacent.”
Pierce, who, at 82 years old, still attends the march to enjoy what she calls “humanity at its best,” said to her that Martin Luther King Jr. Day means a man believed we could all live together in harmony.
“And that’s worth celebrating,” she said.
