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We shall overcome. |
Y'all voted for this. You are going to regret it.
President Donald J. Trump's second inauguration is on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Many are actively protesting and boycotting events in relation to Trump.
Snoop Dogg, Soulja Boy, Nelly, Rick Ross, Waka Flocka Flame and other rappers are being boycotted for appearing at Trump inaugural events.
Bernice King continues to dismiss Republican and Democratic lawmakers using her father as a symbol to their horrendous acts against humanity.
Republicans continue to use selective quotes from King to justify white supremacy.
Immigration rights activists are filing lawsuits against Trump and the Department of Homeland Security as the kickoff to mass deportation begins.
Pro Palestinian groups continue to press on despite the ceasefire. Israel has already violated the ceasefire despite the agreements to release captured IDF soliders and settlers. Palestinians who were placed in Israeli custody were not given the rock star treatment as the settlers (soliders) being released from Gazan custody.
Alveda King, the cousin of Bernice and Martin Luther King, III will attend the Trump inauguration. She is feuding with the surviving son and daughter of the late civil rights leader. Alveda continues a misrepresentation of King's legacy.
Charlie Kirk is pressing for Republicans to repeal King day. Many of these Republicans are listening to Kirk.
Kirk calls King a Marxist and racial arsonist who didn’t deserve a holiday.
Several states in the South will celebrate the disgraceful legacymof Robert E. Lee.
Pete Hegseth has promise to return the original Confederate names to military installations in the South.
if King was alive, he would be 96 years old. He would be vilified by the far right like the retired civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, Sr. and National Action Network leader Rev. Al Sharpton. Shaprton is a host on MSNBC.
At the age of 39, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assasinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
It came 10 years after a woman tried to stab him to death. Izola Curry, a former housekeeper tried to kill King when he appeared at a book signing in Harlem.
Curry blamed the NAACP and King for her failures as a she tried to find work.
He was there on behalf of striking garbage workers. After a staying at the Lorraine Motel, King and a few of his friends were going to have a dinner.
A gunman fired from a windows in a neighboring motel room striking him in the head and chest.
King was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was known for his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested on June 8, 1968, at London's Heathrow Airport, extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. On March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and to be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful. Ray died in prison in 1998.
King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking African-American city sanitation workers. The workers had staged a walkout on February 11, 1968, to protest unequal wages and working conditions imposed by mayor Henry Loeb. At the time, Memphis paid black workers significantly lower wages than it did white workers. There were no city-issued uniforms, no restrooms, no recognized union, and no grievance procedure for the numerous occasions on which they were underpaid. During Loeb's tenure as mayor, conditions did not significantly improve, and the gruesome February 1968 deaths of two workers in a garbage-compacting truck turned mounting tensions into a strike.
Many communities have roads, bridges, buildings and monuments named after him.
The King family have repeatedly denounced Trump, particularly as the GOP nominee has continually invoked the civil rights legend’s name.
Trump has falsely claimed that his 2020 inauguration speech drew the same number of people to the National Mall as the March on Washington that saw King give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
So once again why do we honor King when the U.S. is never committed to his legacy?
On the third Monday of January, the U.S. government acknowledged it as a national holiday. It is the only national holiday that celebrates the life of a non government official.
Now honestly, I believe it is a travesty to King by giving him a holiday. I believe the key to honoring his legacy is to eliminate the hate the U.S. continues to fester in.
King should never be forgotten. His legacy as a civil rights leader was controversial.
Republicans opposed the holiday in the 1980s. It was John Conyers who made the holiday a national law. He pushed for it and then president Ronald Reagan vehemently opposed it on the grounds that he viewed King as a Communist. White nationalists like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott.
He was vilified by conservatives. Black figures like Malcolm X called him a sell-out or a traitor to his race. Others claimed he was a snake oil salesman, an adulterer and a fraud.
From 1953 until his untimely death in 1968, King led the fight for Blacks in the South. He called for an end to Jim Crow segregation laws, establish voting rights for Blacks, and call for an end to poverty.
So many things happened during his time on earth but most didn't know he was a marked man because he stood up against the system.
Did you know he nearly committed suicide after his grandmother passed away?
Did you know that King did not trust white people at one time hated them for the way they treated his father, brother and mother?
Did you know he survive two assassination attempts before the Memphis encounter?
Did you know Martin Luther King was an independent not a Republican?
Democrats were not all on board with civil rights. Republicans at one time were the champions of civil rights. With the fears of communism and the conservative rise of charlatans like Joseph McCarthy, Strom Thrumond and Barry Goldwater, King was the other enemy to the far right.
King did lead the Montgomery bus boycott, the Albany, Georgia movement and protest in Birmingham. Richard Nixon blew an opportunity to win Black voters. Then vice president brushed off the calls to take on Southern governors attempts to stop desegregation. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts called upon the release of King and asked for his brother Robert and civil rights leaders to aid him. That earned King's endorsement. Kennedy would become the 35th President of the United States.
Kennedy was cautious about King. He knew the allegations of associating with alleged communists would be damaging to him. Kennedy kept the fight for civil rights but died because of it.
He was assassinated in 1963 and Lyndon B. Johnson took control. During that time, King worked with Johnson to get the Kennedy agenda to fruition. It took a speech at the Lincoln Memorial to drive the world to King.
King helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
It was an ugly fight in the 1960s in the South. There was the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the killing of civil rights workers in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, the arrest of King and his allies.
The Klan was at its strongest during the 1960s. The federal government was pressured to do something.
The SCLC put into practice the tactics of nonviolent protest with some success by strategically choosing the methods and places in which protests were carried out. There were several dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities, who sometimes turned violent.
J. Edgar Hoover considered King a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963, forward. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital affairs and reported on them to government officials, and, in 1964, mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.
King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He was there for the signings of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act under President Lyndon B Johnson.
The two would lose favor after Johnson vowed to support Israel during the infamous Six Day War and his commitment to take on the Viet Cong in Vietnam.
King distanced himself from the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries. He didn't endorse candidates. Johnson sought to no longer be president and it led to a lot of tension.
During the striking garbage workers in Memphis, an assassin shot King in April. The Lorraine Motel in Memphis is now a memorial to his passing.
Since 1983, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday is celebrated in the United States. It was the first holiday to an African American and a non politician. On the third Monday of the month of January, we honor King's legacy and offer a day of service.
I seriously believe that if King was alive, he would be disappointed in the way things are going.
Oh by the way, for those who believe King was a supporter of gun rights, he did own a firearm but refused to use it citing his children accidently shooting themselves if they got a hold of it.
He was a victim of gun violence too.
Gun violence is the biggest threat to the United States.
Republicans and some Democrats twist his legacy into a partisan agenda.
Republicans are on board with white nationalism and dog whistle politics.
Democrats are on the side of white gentificiation and side piece meal politics.
Both sides are not working in the interest of King.
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