(UPDATE) Honoring Rev. King…

N.J.'s People's Organization for Progress rallies to remember the Actual Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

UPDATE: An interesting reality check arrived via email, it seems that the title of honoring Dr. King must have flipped an automated-switch on the computers at the Build the Dream site. They are raising money for the proposed Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in DC. Now while I have nothing against a National Memorial to Dr. King, the promotional video on their site inadvertently illustrates the very point we made about the comic-book fantasy of "King-the-Dreamer" as opposed the actual historic activist Martin King…

Check out their King-the-Dreamer video and their site here.

—Rahim

Lawrence Hamm, People's Organization for Progress chairman, and POP Financial Secretary Angenetta Robinson place wreath at the largest memorial to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the State of New Jersey.

Although it might seem a bit late to post photos from the People's Organization for Progress' annual memorial on the anniversary of King's April 4 assassination, today is the 42nd anniversary of Dr. King's funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands filling block after block near the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

For a number of years, POP has held a wreath-laying at the Martin Luther King. Jr. monument at the MLK Plaza Hudson-Bergen Light Rail station in Jersey City. Last Sunday was a beautiful day and POP was well received by neighborhood residents, many walking home from church after Easter Sunday services.

POP members and neighborhood residents at Hudson-Bergen MLK Light Rail station

Every January 15th since the Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthday Holiday was signed into law in 1983, Dr. King's legacy becomes the stuff of government-sponsored hallucination. No one is supposed to remember the opposition that even the idea of this holiday faced in Congress. In fact, many of the same politicians (and news media talking-heads) who nowadays candy-coat his legacy into a fantasy of "dreams" and "non-violence," were violent opponents of the national King holiday for nearly twenty years.

But for the past eight years since the present US adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq began, thoughtful commentators (some even in the mainstream media) have taken the April 4th anniversary of Rev. King's murder to remind us that the date of Dr. King's murder falls on the one-year anniversary of his "Time to Break Silence" sermon at Riverside Church where he publicly proclaimed his opposition to the War in Vietnam.

Larry Hamm, Chairman of the People's Organization for Progress, "drops a little history"

But to truly understand the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we must take a deeper, more nuanced view of history. As speakers at the rally pointed out, King's 1968 opposition to US imperialism in Vietnam and his view that the cost of the war kept necessary funds from reaching poor communities, was the end of "universal support" from Black clergy. But as People's Organization for Progress chairman Lawrence Hamm pointed out, the history was even more complicated than that! In fact, the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in 1963 was not a philosophic essay expounding the tactic of non-violence. Though some observers may allege that today, at the time it was an appeal to clergy of Birmingham (including African-American preachers) who had opposed the Birmingham campaign altogether. "Many Black clergy had asked Dr. King to stay home, not to cause trouble," Larry Hamm told the crowd, "Many who today claim to have 'marched with Martin' were the same preachers who called him a 'trouble-maker' or a 'communist' and asked King to stay out of Birmingham."

POP Vice Chair Larry Adams, a Jersey City resident, speaks

As one speaker pointed out, "Historically the most significant aspect of Dr. King's assassination was the character assassination carried out by supposed friends and supporters after Martin's death, people who turned Rev. King into 'a man with a dream' instead of the people's fighter that he was!"

To view additional photos from last Saturday's memorial click here.

Old billboard in Tennessee purporting to show Martin Luther King at "Communist Training School" (it is actually the Highlander Center for Labor Education, and Mrs. Rosa Parks is there as well).

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The Dead of Birmingham

Denise McNair.

Carole Robertson.

Addie Mae Collins.

Cynthia Wesley.

For many of us who came up in the ‘60s, these names will always be instantly recognizable, impossible to read or to hear—no matter how long it has been—without a deep emotional pull, an admixture of sorrow and anger and, most of all, a profound sense of loss.

Forty-six years ago today, a bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan murderers took the lives of four young teenage girls as they prepared for the first ever Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. I write this to acknowledge their deaths, sacrifices in the long and painful struggle for Black Freedom, burnt offerings in a conflagration that wound up helping to consume the system of Jim Crow segregation in the Black Belt South.

I write also to memorialize two other young African Americans who died in Birmingham that day. Their names do not have the same resonance, but they died at the hands of white supremacy in this country as surely as did the young women in the basement of Sixteenth Street Baptist, and their deaths are the kind of deaths that the system still deals out to young Black men in this country.

For all the hold that the Civil Rights Movement’s non-violent ideology had in Birmingham, which had been a battleground against segregation, the killings sparked intense fury in the Black community and the area around the church seethed in near-riot all afternoon. The cars of white gawkers coming past had a hard time of it. When sixteen-year-old Johnnie Robinson saw one marked up with slogans like "Negro, Go Back To Africa," he chucked a rock at it.

Seeing cops, he fled. As Johnnie ran down an alley, Birmingham cop Jack Parker shot him. In the back. With a shotgun. Johnnie was DOA at University Hospital. An all-white grand jury failed to indict Parker for anything.

The final death was that of thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware, "Peanut" to his family. His father and uncles were coal miners, working at the Docena mine, and Virgil and two brothers shared a paper route. Riding home on the handlebars of his brother James‘s bicycle, Virgil crossed paths with Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old white Eagle Scouts, who had just attended a rabid segregationist rally where an effigy of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was burned.

Riding with Farley on his red motorbike decorated with a confederate flag picked up at the National States’ Rights Party headquarters and pieced up with Farley’s pearl-handled pistol, Sims fired at the bike twice.

Virgil fell off and James cried, "Get up, Virge. You trimmin’ me."

"I’m shot," Virgil replied. He was, through the lung and the aorta. He died, the sixth victim of a racist murder in Birmingham that day.

The Birmingham press treated it as a tragedy--for the killers. “These two raw, grieved untutored boys who have had this unfortunate thing come into their lives at their age,” was how their high–priced lawyer put it. Both were charged with first degree murder. A Birmingham jury convicted Sims of second degree manslaughter and Farley pleaded to the same. Wallace Gibson, a white judge, the only kind on the bench in Alabama at the time, completed the travesty by suspending their sentences in favor of two years probation.

When we remember Addie, Carole, Denise and Cynthia, it behooves us to remember Johnnie and Virgil as well.

Because young African Americans are still being shot in the back by cops, like Oscar Grant in Oakland last year. Because cops still routinely get a slap on the wrist, if that, for outrageous shootings. Because the "criminal justice system" in the US still treats the killing of a young Black man as a lesser crime than other murders. Because today there are racists every bit as rabid, and as desperate, as those who attended the rally on the day of the church bombing, and they too are burning effigies, waving the Confederate flag and hiding behind talk of states’ rights.

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