Three Kentucky Sites on New National Civil Rights Trail

Despite Kentucky having waited until the war was over to join the Confederacy, or perhaps because of that, activists here stepped up when it counted,

From the Herald:

Kentucky and 11 other states are debuting a U.S. Civil Rights Trail on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

The trail, which includes more than 130 landmarks, will highlight three sites in Kentucky: Berea College, Louisville and the Simpsonville birthplace of civil rights leader Whitney Young. 
 
“It is an honor to have Kentucky’s historic sites included in the U.S. Civil Rights Trail,” said Kristen Branscum, Tourism Commissioner for the Kentucky Department of Tourism. “This trail presents us the unique opportunity to reflect on our history and inspire us as we embark on our path to be a multicultural destination for residents and visitors alike.”

The trail was created after National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis challenged historians two years ago to inventory surviving civil rights landmarks. 

Berea College was the site of a 20-hour pro-integration sit-in; in the 1960s, Louisville became known for a city-wide civil rights movement; and Simpsonville’s Young received the Medal of Freedom in 1968 for his work fighting employment discrimination, according to the Kentucky Department of Tourism.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article194702284.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article194702284.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article194702284.html#storylink=cpyThe trail was created after National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis challenged historians two years ago to inventory surviving civil rights landmarks.

Radicals Together

Monday is a Day ON.  You can participate in the March and Program at UK or MLK Week in Louisville.

Simon Balto at LGM:

This April 4 will mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, which means that in 2018 we will probably see even more frequent mendacious arguments from conservatives about King and what he’d think of modern America than we do in any other given year.

In his award-winning book Blood Done Sign My Name, historian Tim Tyson writes that, “In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates. Politicians who oppose everything King worked for now jostle their way onto podiums to honor his memory. Many of them quote Dr. King out of context as they denounce ‘affirmative action,’ despite the fact that King repeatedly, publicly, and passionately supported that principle….[O]ur memories about what actually happened in the civil rights era are so faulty that Dr. King’s enemies can safely use his words to thwart his goals.”

Tyson’s book came out years before Black Lives Matter, and the conservative lust to use King’s legacy in precisely the way that Tyson describes has only been amplified in recent years. O’Reilly does it. Huckabee too. Newspaper columnists, etc.

The idea that King would oppose this generation’s most prominent struggle for racial justice is absurd, of course, but I appreciate Ulriksen making the point explicitly that Kaep and Michael Bennett and the rest of those who kneel and march in service of justice today are firmly in keeping with King’s legacy. In his time, King was in many ways an American radical. He wasn’t murdered for being a moderate.

Via Political Animal:

 

The Resistance: Record the Atrocities

Digby:

This is a useful exercise. Amy Siskind is keeping a list of the weekly Trump atrocities on Facebook. Here's just this week.

This is by far the worse:

28. After Congress was briefed by Intelligence chiefs, Rep John Lewis said, "I don't see Trump as a legitimate president."
29. Next morning, Trump tweeted a disparaging attack on Lewis, on MLK weekend, saying he was all talk.

That would be this John Lewis:



Digby again:

Obviously Trump has no clue who John Lewis is or he's the last person he would say is "all talk." In fact, Trump saying that about anyone is insane, but to say it about a man who was beaten half to death fighting for civil rights is obscene. 

But our new president doesn't know that because he really doesn't know much of anything. He is an imbecile.

I think he does know who John Lewis is and leaped at the opportunity to smack down an uppity ni**er.

Make Economic Justice MLK's Next Legacy

If you do nothing else today to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., call your Kentucky legislators and tell them to raise the minimum wage and reform Kentucky's regressive tax system to make the rich pay their fair share and support working people.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

On this national holiday honoring the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., it is worth remembering that he focused on more than racial justice. The next big issue on his agenda was economic justice.

King was murdered in 1968 while in Memphis to help striking sanitation workers get better pay and treatment. At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his "I have a Dream" speech, one of the key issues was raising the minimum wage enough to lift many workers out of poverty.

While America has made great strides in racial equality and opportunity, it finds itself in a similar economic situation to what those marchers faced 50 years ago. The income of the wealthiest Americans has soared over the past three decades, while middle-class wages have stagnated and many low-wage workers have fallen into poverty.

Foreclosing on the Dream - Literally

I swear, banks have no public relations sense at all.

From Rebuild the Dream:

We’ve seen banks make some pretty audacious moves, but this one takes the cake.

Just days away from the MLK holiday, BB&T bank is attempting to foreclose on one of the oldest churches in Dr. King’s old neighborhood -- Vine City in Atlanta, Georgia.

The church, Higher Ground Empowerment Center, has been a cornerstone of one of Atlanta’s most historic and under-resourced communities for the past 108 years. After a tornado ripped through the property in 2008, the church was forced to take out a loan to cover the repairs. It has managed to pick itself up, rebuild, and continue servicing the community.
But now BB&T wants to foreclose, ignoring the church's attempts to work with the bank to modify the loan.

This church needs your help, so we've started an emergency petition.

Sign the petition and tell BB&T's CEO Kelly King to stop foreclosure on this historic pillar of the community.

BB&T took $3.1 billion in bailout money from the American people in 2008 and used it to eat up hundreds of smaller banks, acquiring another $26 billion in assets the following year.

Higher Ground Empowerment Center is not asking for a bailout. For four years, they’ve simply been asking BB&T to modify their loan to something more reasonable, based on the property's fair value. But the bank has refused.

Sadly, their situation is just like millions of other homes and properties with underwater mortgages -- banks just seem to lack all manners and decency, and often won't even return phone calls.

In this case, the reason is simple -- the church is sitting on a valuable piece of land and the bank stands to make a huge profit.

Since 2004, Vine City has been undergoing “urban renewal” efforts. Through this process, banks have foreclosed on business owners and residents in the short term, while profiting off of inflated property values in the long run.

If this church is foreclosed, it will have a domino effect on the rest of the community.

Occupy Atlanta has jumped in to support the Higher Ground Empowerment Center and the Vine City community. They've brought valuable attention to this situation, and the bank is showing that they're paying attention. Now is a critical moment to add momentum and show the bank that people across the country are watching. BB&T should be helping, not exploiting, the church and the Vine City community.

Click here to sign the petition and tell BB&T CEO Kelly King to negotiate fairly with the church.

Thank you for taking a stand,

Van, Natalie, Billy, Jim, Ian, Somer and the rest of the Rebuild the Dream team

After you sign, wash the taste of BB&T's abomination out of your mouth with the Top Ten Civil Rights Songs from The Nation.

(Note prominent omissions cited in comments, including We Shall Overcome.)

Real Terrorism Ignored

All the TSA radiation poisoning and cavity searches didn't stop and never will stop the real terrorism we face from the mouthbreathing Tim McVeigh wannabees.

The only things that prevented a catastrophic bombing in downtown Spokane that would far overshadow the Murrah federal building destruction was a sharp-eyed onlooker and a terrorist with poor planning skills.

Zandar:

That MLK Day terrorist bombing attempt story nobody's talking about? Keeps getting worse.

The bomb found along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Wash., may have been packed with a blood-thinning chemical that's found in rat poison in an effort to inflict worse injuries.

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told the Spokesman-Review that the bomb -- which officials have already described as sophisticated, with the potential to be devastating -- had some sort of chemical in it, and authorities have speculated that it may be a chemical found in rat poison. The bomb, which was defused without incident last Monday, has been sent for testing to a lab at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The FBI and other officials have declined to release any information about the bomb's makeup. Knezovich said, though, that the bomb was also packed with shrapnel.

The theory is that someone hit with a piece of shrapnel covered in an anti-coagulant is more likely to bleed to death. Israeli officials have claimed in the past that Palestinian terrorists were using rat poison to make their bombs more deadly.

Yeah, see, this bomb was designed to inflict as many injuries and deaths as possible at a MLK Day parade, and yet we continue to hear nothing about it. No suspects, no leads, just that it was domestic terrorism...and that apparently it's not worth giving a damn about.

We had near national manhunts on our hands after other bombing attempts. The Spokane bombing attempt? Nothing. This story continues to be spiked for reasons unknown.

I don't like thinking about the possibility that the story's being spiked to protect the suspects, or to ignore the victims. Either one of those is repugnant. We'll see.

Neither one would surprise me, but I'm going to go with a Villager-infected national media too lazy and cowardly to deal with the reality of white, home-grown, right-wing freakazoids Beck fans out to kill minorities and liberals.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Was Not Civil

The Rude Pundit reminds us that King demanded action, and wasn't nice about it.

Because King believed in nuts-and-bolts action, not mere words. And he believed, wholeheartedly that government was part of the solution, not an impediment to social justice. Here he is in a 1964 version of his "American Dream" speech, delivered at Drew Univesity in Madison, New Jersey: "Now the other myth that is disseminated is the idea that legislation and judicial decrees and executive orders from the President cannot really solve the problem of racial injustice, only education and religion can do that. Now certainly a half-truth is involved here: if the problem is to be solved ultimately, hearts must be changed and religion and education must play a great role at this point. But it is merely a half-truth, for it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless." He added, ironically, tragically, "It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also."

In a 1965 version of the same speech, this time delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King said, "[W]e must join the war against poverty and believe in the dignity of all work. What makes a job menial? I’m tired of this stuff about menial labor. What makes it menial is that we don’t pay folk anything. Give somebody a job and pay them some money so they can live and educate their children and buy a home and have the basic necessities of life. And no matter what the job is it takes on dignity.

"I submit to you when I took off on that plane this morning, I saw men go out there in their overalls. I saw them working on things here and there, and saw some more going out there to put the breakfast on there so that we could eat on our way to Atlanta. And I said to myself that these people who constitute the ground crew are just as significant as the pilot, because this plane couldn’t move if you didn’t have the ground crew. I submit to you that in Hugh Spaulding or Grady Hospital, the woman or the man who goes in there to sweep the floor is just as significant as the doctor, because if he doesn’t get that dust off the floor germs will begin to circulate. And those same germs can do injury and harm to the human being. I submit to you this morning that there is dignity in all work when we learn to pay people decent wages. Whoever cooks in your house, whoever sweeps the floor in your house is just as significant as anybody who lives in that house. And everybody that we call a maid is serving God in a significant way. And I love the maids, I love the people who have been ignored, and I want to see them get the kind of wages that they need. And their job is no longer a menial job, for you come to see its worth and its dignity.

"Are we really taking this thing seriously? 'All men are created equal.' And that means that every man who lives in a slum today is just as significant as John D., Nelson, or any other Rockefeller. Every man who lives in the slum is just as significant as Henry Ford."

A janitor is as important as, say, Bill Gates? In this America, it's unimaginable to say such a thing. It's why King believed it was incumbent upon the government to guarantee income and health care and housing: because everyone should be given an equal playing field to attempt to achieve the American Dream, that it didn't belong to the privileged alone. To express a belief in the necessity of government as a force for good in our daily lives is not allowed now. It is not part of our debate anymore, as watered down a position as almost every one of Martin Luther King's.

President Obama got to where he is by not being an "angry black man." Somebody needs to tell him that an angry black man is exactly what this country needs right now.

Fighting and Dying in Defense of Public Employee Unions

Tom Eblen has a good column in the Lexington Herald this morning about Martin Luther King's search for economic justice beyond racial justice.

But 43 years ago, King's last fight was for something far more specific: fair pay and benefits for unionized public employees.

Laura Flanders explains:

It's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, the holiday that celebrates the Nobel Peace Prize–winner's birth and life. The Reverend King wasn't assassinated, as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords almost was, at a Congress on Your Corner. Or on a civil rights march.

He was assassinated in Memphis, where he was showing up to support the right of public employees to organize and strike.

What have civil rights got to do with public workers' rights? To use President Obama's language in Tucson, we need to "widen our circle of concern"—as King did—when it comes to civil rights.

Dr. King didn't distinguish social rights from economic rights, surprising as that may seem to the commentators who've shrunk down his story for convenience sake. Like Eleanor Roosevelt and many of her contemporaries, King saw a linkage between legal rights—being permitted, say, to see a quality doctor, attend a quality school or live in a quality community—and economic rights: actually being able to make a living that permits you do to any of those things.

King saw public workers as the first line of defense. That's why he went to Memphis to stand by striking sanitation members of AFSCME, the public worker's union. In his view they led the way in the fight for fair pay and benefits... and in the fight for dignity for those who shovel our snow and clean our streets.

Daniel Hernandez, the intern for Gabrielle Giffords who is credited with saving her life, said something King-like at Wednesday's memorial service.

"We must reject the title of 'hero' and reserve it for those who deserve it, and those who deserve it are the first responders and the public servants and the people who have made sure they have dedicated their lives to helping others.”

With exactly those workers under attack right now, Hernandez, the out gay son of an immigrant, was right on target. This Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we would all do well to join King and Hernandez—and widen our circle of civil rights concern to include those who do the work that enables the rest of us to do ours cleanly, calmly and safely.

The Reich Wing is successfully demonizing public employee unions on the way to destroying not just unions, not even just public employees, but the whole concept of government providing public services.

From the mundane yet necessary - garbage collection and snow removal - to the heroic - firefighters and EMTs - public services performed by public employees make everyday life tolerable. Without them, we would descend into anarchy and barbarism.

Honor Dr. Martin Luther King by recognizing the work public employees do, and making sure other people recognize it, too.

Celebrate the Inauguration With a Day of Service

So you can't get to D.C. for the Inauguration of a Lifetime. You can, however, honor the star of that event by responding to his request that you join him on Monday for a Day of Service in your own community.



Click here to find a Martin Luther King Day volunteer service event in your community.

I used it to search for volunteer service events within 50 miles of my rural Kentucky home and got a list of 60 from a wide variety of organizations.

Find an event near you, and get this administration started off right.