Rev. Rosa Lee Harden challenges us all to not only remember the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this holiday, but to actively work toward fulfilling his dream of economic equality together.
The Poor People’s Campaign’s “Third Reconstruction” resolution highlights what it calls a congressional failure to elevate the poor through social programs, voting-rights expansion and the elimination of systemic racism. It details suggested solutions for each of these problems, including an increase in the long-stagnant federal minimum wage, provisions to expand insurance coverage, a large-scale reduction of student debt and prison reform.
It’s like it happened yesterday. Fifty-five years ago, I was watching the news in my parents’ home in Gary, Ind., when I saw the news that James Meredith had been shot. I couldn’t know then that some day I’d be married to the man gunned down in the middle of a Mississippi road for demanding equality for Black Americans.
The protest against Confederate monuments as symbols of racial injustice is not new. It is also not new to Mississippi. As Karen Cox describes in her new book, “No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice,” that protest was front and center in 1966 during the now infamous Meredith March in Mississippi. Here is an excerpt from her book about protests against statues in Grenada, Greenwood and Belzoni during James Meredith’s 1966 “March Against Fear.”
One summer, a sweet white lady really wanted VBS to be inviting for folks outside our church, and she was inspired to give it a ’50s theme. The 1950s. In Montgomery. We objected. She didn’t understand our concern. She wanted fun sock-hops and poodle skirts and was not at all pleased when I asked if we were going to have colored drinking fountains and restrooms.
Most of America’s MLK neighborhoods, from east Montgomery, Alabama, to Harlem in New York City, were born of legal or de facto racial segregation. And in the second half of the 20th century, they experienced the sharpest decline in urban industry, sending local jobs from the cities to suburbs. These historic events first caused, then structurally perpetuated, deprivation in MLK neighborhoods.
MFP editor Donna Ladd’s pilgrimage to civil-rights hero James Chaney’s grave in rural Lauderdale County reminded her we cannot go back to 1964-style racism.
I first met John Lewis in 1966 at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) office in Atlanta. I last saw him dancing two years ago in Tunica, Miss.
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