The week's good news: April 5, 2018

(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Jump to category:

1. Young men march 50 miles to Memphis in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
2. After searching for decades, family reunites with daughter who went missing 24 years ago
3. 50 years after getting a divorce, Kentucky couple will tie the knot for a second time
4. Nurse makes sure cancer patient gets his final wish: to fly in an airplane
5. Texas teen accepted to 20 top universities, offered full rides to all of them

published 5 April 2018

1. Young men march 50 miles to Memphis in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The six young men walked 50 miles from Dundee, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, in honor of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The March to Memphis began on Saturday, when the young men, students between the ages of 14 and 21 from Pearl and Richland, Mississippi, set off for Tennessee. They are part of a mentoring program run by the Pearson Foundation, and the march's organizer, Jarvis Ward, told ABC News they decided to go on the trek to honor King on the 50th anniversary of his assassination and to remember his "fight for racial justice" and "economic justice." The group arrived in Memphis on Wednesday, where they attended a youth rally and visited the Civil Rights Museum. They walked about 10 to 15 miles a day, and stopped in different communities for meetings where they would discuss race in America and the civil rights movement.

He never stopped trying to find his daughter, and after 24 years of searching, Wang Mingqing was finally reunited with Kang Ying. In 1994, Wang and his wife, Liu Chengying, brought their daughter, Qifeng, to the fruit stall they operated in Chengdu, China. They briefly took their eyes off of the 3-year-old, and she disappeared. They spent years trying to find her. When Wang became a driver with a ride-sharing company in 2015, he put up a sign in his car asking for information on Qifeng. A police sketch artist drew a picture of what Qifeng might look like today, and two weeks ago, a 27-year-old woman named Kang Ying saw the drawing and thought it looked a lot like her. Kang contacted Wang on social media, and on Sunday, a DNA test confirmed she was Qifeng. On Tuesday, she reunited with her parents and siblings who were born after her disappearance.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

They divorced five decades ago, but after reconnecting at a family reunion, Harold Holland and Lillian Barnes want to give their marriage another shot. "I don't think we ever lost that love, to tell you the truth," Holland told the Lexington Herald Leader. Holland, 83, and Barnes, 78, got married in 1955, and had five children. Holland said it was "100 percent my fault" that they divorced in 1967, because he worked too much. They remained friendly, and both ended up remarrying — Barnes' third husband died in 2015, as did Holland's second wife. At the family reunion last year, they realized they still cared for each other, and decided to rekindle their romance, agreeing in December to tie the knot again. Their grandson, Joshua Holland, is a minister, and will marry his grandparents on April 14 in Lexington, Kentucky.

As a kid, Joe Booth used to enjoy building model planes, but never got the chance to actually fly in one. Booth has prostate cancer, and when his doctors told him in February he should discontinue taking his medication, he started thinking of things he wanted to do before it was too late — and that included flying in an airplane for the first time. The 69-year-old New Albany, Indiana, resident told his oncology nurse about his wish, and she found a pilot to fly him above southern Indiana. Not only did Booth get to be a passenger, but he was also briefly the pilot. "It was priceless," his son, Brian Booth, told the Courier Journal. "He has never done anything like that. He actually took the steering wheel and flew for a bit." Booth said it was "an experience. It's a different world all together up there."

Micheal Brown is living a high school senior's dream — the Houston 17-year-old has been accepted to 20 of the best universities in the country, plus offered full-ride scholarships to each one of them. "It's something I'm proud of because I see my hard work paying off, determination paying off, sacrifices paying off," Brown told CNN. His top choices as of now are Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Georgetown, and Vanderbilt, and Brown said he's going to go on tours of several schools before making his final choice on May 1. Brown attends Mirabeau B. Lamar High School, and is active in debate, mock trial, and student government. He said he became interested in politics after the election of former President Barack Obama, and has volunteered with different campaigns. Brown would like to major in political science, with the possibility of adding on a second degree in economics.

Explore More

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.