Ask anyone who ever met John Jenkins in person — or heard him speak —and the one word you'd probably hear most when describing him is "positive."
Another? Enthusiastic.
Jenkins succumbed to an illness Wednesday at the age of 68, ending a life spent mostly looking at what's good about the world — when it could have so easily turned out much differently.
Jenkins grew up in Newark, New Jersey — a city plagued by deadly civil rights riots in the 1960s. It was into this chaos that Dr. Martin Luther King inserted himself, in an effort to stop the violence.
"To see the social fabric of that which you have known and become familiar with start tearing, shearing apart...seeing people literally get shot right in front of my house....it's something that doesn't leave you," Jenkins said in a 2017 interview with NEWS CENTER Maine.
On his way to march with sanitation workers in Memphis, King stopped in Newark where he met the young John Jenkins, who was president of his high school's student body at the time. Jenkins introduced him on stage, even though we wasn't entirely sure he agreed with what King had to say to an angry audience.
"He said if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek and I would say 'yeah you hit me and it's on,'" Jenkins said. "Newark had its own riots and devastation and there were other voices who had a chant of saying 'burn baby burn.' Dr. King arrived at my high school and his words were not burn baby burn because it doesn't make sense that you're burning your own neighborhoods etc. He said 'you need to abandon that idea of burn baby burn.' But he said instead, 'learn baby learn.'"
A week later, Dr. King was assassinated.
But Jenkins kept dreaming. Those dreams took him to Bates college, where his mentor became Dr. Benjamin E. Mayes, a King confidant. He was also a student athlete. Physical fitness would be a constant in his life for decades to come.
Jenkins went on to be elected mayor of Lewiston and of Auburn and serve in the Maine Senate. He was Lewiston's first Black mayor and was also the first person of color to win a seat in the Maine Senate. All the while, he was spreading his message of positivity to people young and old alike.
"You find the thing you're good at and bring those gifts to bear for the greater good of the community," Jenkins said.
Jenkins' death represents a big loss, both to the Lewiston-Auburn area and to the state of Maine as a whole.