Dr. King Weeps From His Grave
The New York Times
By CORNEL WEST
August 25, 2011


Selected passages

...[T]he age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable...

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle. Read the full post here

Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010
By FRANK RICH
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
July 2, 2010

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago. Read more here

Florida Civil Rights Act ("FCRA")
Sections 760.01 - 760.11, Florida Statutes

760.01 Purposes; construction; title.—

(1) Sections 760.01-760.11 and 509.092 shall be cited as the "Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992."

(2) The general purposes of the Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992 are to secure for all individuals within the state freedom from discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicap, or marital status and thereby to protect their interest in personal dignity, to make available to the state their full productive capacities, to secure the state against domestic strife and unrest, to preserve the public safety, health, and general welfare, and to promote the interests, rights, and privileges of individuals within the state.

(3) The Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992 shall be construed according to the fair import of its terms and shall be liberally construed to further the general purposes stated in this section and the special purposes of the particular provision involved.

Dr. King’s 1963 Dream realized with the election of President Obama, 2008

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

The White House

Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

New York Times

By SHAILA DEWAN

June 1, 2010

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case. The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed "arrogant" and "pretty vocal." In another woman, he said he "detected hostility." Read more here

National Black Farmers Association

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized Republicans for blocking a measure that would compensate black farmers engaged in a decades-old discrimination suit against the U.S. Agriculture Department.

MLK and Pres. Johnson

Martin Luther King, Jr.
From Wikipedia

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King is often presented as a heroic leader in the history of modern American liberalism.

A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, serving as its first president. King's efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. There, he expanded American values to include the vision of a color blind society, and established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history.

In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and stopping the Vietnam War. Read more here

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, sought to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. and stop the Civil Rights Movement

J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director

Final Report of The Select Committee
To Study Governmental Operations
And Intelligence Activities

United States Senate
April 23, 1976

From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to "neutralize" him as an effective civil rights leader. In the words of the man in charge of the FBI's "war" against Dr. King:

"No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business."

The FBI collected information about Dr. King's plans and activities through an extensive surveillance program, employing nearly every intelligence-gathering technique at the Bureau's disposal. Wiretaps, which were initially approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were maintained on Dr. King's home telephone from October 1963 until mid-1965; the SCLC headquarter's telephones were covered by wiretaps for an even longer period. Phones in the homes and offices of some of Dr. King's close advisers were also wiretapped. The FBI has acknowledged 16 occasions on which microphones were hidden in Dr. King's hotel and motel rooms in an "attempt" to obtain information about the "private activities of King and his advisers" for use to "completely discredit" them. Read more here

Sen. Frank Church

Church Committee
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.

By the early years of the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the unfolding Watergate scandal brought the era of minimal oversight to an abrupt halt. The US Congress was determined to rein in the Nixon administration and to ascertain the extent to which the nation's intelligence agencies had been involved in questionable, if not outright illegal, activities. Read more here

FBI COINTELPRO

From Wikipedia

COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.

COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological warfare, planting false reports in the media, smearing through forged letters, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, extralegal violence and assassination. Covert operations under COINTELPRO took place between 1956 and 1971; however, the FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception. The FBI's stated motivation at the time was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order. Read more here

Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil rights movement
The Commercial Appeal
by Marc Perrusquia
September 12, 2010

At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn't just a murder. This was history.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle. Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.

Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel - King's room - and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He'd marched with King, and sat in on some of the movement's sensitive strategy meetings.

A veteran freelancer for America's black press, Withers was known as "the original civil rights photographer," an insider who'd covered it all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the movement in 1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole Miss and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis and his death. Read more here

John Brown
National Park Service

On October 16, 17, and 18, 1859, John Brown and his "Provisional Army of the United States" took possession of the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown had come to arm an uprising of slaves. Instead, the raid drew militia companies and federal troops from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. On the morning of October 18, a storming party of 12 Marines broke down the door of the Armory's fire enginehouse, taking Brown and the remaining raiders captive.

Brown, charged for "conspiring with slaves to commit treason and murder," was tried, convicted, and hanged in Charles Town on December 2, 1859. Before the sentence was carried out, however, Brown issued a prophetic warning:

I wish to say furthermore, that you had better – all you people at the South – prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled – this negro question I mean – the end of that is not yet. Read more here

The Last Moments of John Brown, by Thomas Hovenden

On the day of his death he wrote "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."


Emancipation Proclamation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Left: Henry Louis Stephens, untitled watercolor (c. 1863) of a man reading a newspaper with headline "Presidential Proclamation / Slavery"

The Emancipation Proclamation consists of two executive orders issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The first one, issued September 22, 1862, declared the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The second order, issued January 1, 1863, named ten specific states where it would apply. Lincoln issued the Executive Order by his authority as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.

The proclamation did not name the slave-holding border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware, which had never declared a secession, and so it did not free any slaves there. The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, so it also was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties that were in the process of forming West Virginia, as well as seven other named counties and two cities. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and thirteen named parishes of Louisiana, all of which were also already mostly under Federal control at the time of the Proclamation.

The Emancipation Proclamation was criticized at the time for freeing only the slaves over which the Union had no power. Although most slaves were not freed immediately, the Proclamation did free thousands of slaves the day it went into effect in parts of nine of the ten states to which it applied (Texas being the exception). In every Confederate state (except Tennessee and Texas), the Proclamation went into immediate effect in Union-occupied areas and at least 20,000 slaves were freed at once on January 1, 1863.

Read more here

Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.

He successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery. Read more here

Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On December 18, Secretary of State William H. Seward, in a proclamation, declared it to have been adopted. It was the first of the Reconstruction Amendments.

President Lincoln was concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation, which outlawed slavery in the ten Confederate states still in rebellion in 1863, would be seen as a temporary war measure, since it was based on his war powers and did not abolish slavery in the border states or any other areas where slavery was still technically legal. Read more here

Ku Klux Klan rally, Gainesville, FL

Ku Klux Klan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as The Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism. Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist. The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is classified as a hate group.

The first Klan flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities. The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings. The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the civil rights movement and progress among minorities. Read more here

Jim Crow laws
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages.

Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800–1866 Black Codes, which also restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Read more here

FREEDOM RIDERS is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism. Read more here

Freedom Riders

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freedom Riders were Civil Rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (of 1960). The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans May 17.

Boynton v. Virginia had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South.

Read more here

Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders
Eric Etheridge, author

Freedom Riders

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Violence in Alabama was organized by Birmingham Police Sergeant Tom Cook (an avid Ku Klux Klan supporter) and police commissioner Bull Connor. The pair made plans to bring the Ride to an end in Alabama. They assured Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informer and member of Eastview Klavern #13 (the most violent Klan group in Alabama), that the mob would have fifteen minutes to attack the Freedom Riders without any arrests being made. The final plan laid out an initial assault in Anniston with a final assault taking place in Birmingham.

In Anniston, Alabama, a mob attacked the Greyhound bus and slashed its tires. When the crippled bus had to stop several miles outside of town, it was firebombed by the mob chasing it in cars. As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intent on burning the riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or a rider brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, allowing the riders to escape the bus. The riders were viciously beaten as they fled the burning bus, and only warning shots fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being lynched. Read more here

James Peck, seated on a hospital gurney in Birmingham, Alabama, following attack on a Freedom Riders bus. 

Georgia Highway Department Roadside Park sign reading "Entrance, White Only."

Brown v. Board of Education
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement. Read more here

Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site

EMI Strikes Deal With Martin Luther King Jr. Estate
The New York Times
by Dave Itzkoff
March 17, 2009

EMI Music Publishing said that it had signed a deal with the estate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to represent the intellectual property of the civil rights leader. The Times does not disclose that EMI is owned by Citigroup, that’s on Wikipedia. EMI is headquatered in London. EMI said it would also work with Intellectual Properties Management, an Atlanta-based company that licenses Dr. King’s image, likeness and recorded voice for nonmusical works.

The Dream ticket: Dr Martin Luther King and EMI
The Times
by Dan Sabbagh
March 18, 2009

When a defiant Dr Martin Luther King declared to the world in 1963: "I have a dream", he was aspiring to rather more than rubbing shoulders with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Kanye West and Usher.

But as many of the barriers have fallen and much of the Dream has been realised with the taking of the White House by a black president, a new battle is being forged: to protect the copyright of Dr. King's stirring speeches for the benefit of his estate.

EMI has been asked to promote and safeguard his words in the same way that it manages the copyright to more than a million songs, including those of Wonder, West and Usher.

Managers of Dr King's estate turned to EMI in the hope that the British company could track and charge when clips of the speeches appear on sites such as YouTube - and promote and sell them more effectively on iTunes.

Dexter S. King, chairman and chief executive of the King Estate, said that it wanted EMI "to monitor and bring under compliance the unauthorised usages of Dr King's words and intellectual property on the internet and digital media", which would "increase the King Estate's ability to preserve, perpetuate, and protect the great legacy of Martin Luther King". Read more here

Letter from Birmingham Jail
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, also known as The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader. King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham's city government and downtown retailers. It was smuggled out of the jail in a toothpaste tube to avoid the jail's guards. Read more here

Letter from Birmingham Jail
From Bhamwiki


Martin Luther King, Jr in a Jefferson County jail cell in 1967

The Letter from Birmingham Jail, composed by Martin Luther King, Jr from his cell in the Birmingham City Jail and dated April 16, 1963, was a seminal document that established the moral foundations for the non-violent civil rights demonstrations of the Birmingham campaign.

King was arrested along with Ralph Abernathy on Good Friday, April 12, 1963 by Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor for parading without a permit at the outset of the Birmingham campaign. He spent eleven days in jail. The idea of composing a letter in jail was suggested to King by New York Times Magazine editor Harvey Shapiro.

King's letter was written as a direct response to "A Call For Unity", an open letter signed by 8 white clergymen of Birmingham published in the Birmingham News on the day of his arrest. The "Call For Unity" was critical of the protests and incendiary actions organized in Birmingham by "outsiders" and called for forbearance and respect for the law as the courts gradually eroded the worst injustices of segregation. Read more here

The Martin Luther King, Jr.
Research and Education Institute
Stanford University

In 2005, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute was created to provide an institutional home for a broad range of activities illuminating the Nobel Peace laureate’s life and the movements he inspired. The Institute’s endowment supports programs that serve as an enduring link between Stanford’s research resources and King’s dream of global peace with social justice. Read more here

Letter from Birmingham Jail
Encyclopedia of Alabama

Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is the most important written document of the civil rights era. The letter served as a tangible, reproducible account of the long road to freedom in a movement that was largely centered around actions and spoken words. Despite its pragmatic and hurried origins, the document is now considered a classic work of protest literature. Read more here

Time Magazine

LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL
Friday, Jan. 03, 1964


While Martin Luther King Jr. was in Birmingham's city jail last April, a group of white clergymen wrote a public statement criticizing him for "unwise and untimely" demonstrations. King wrote a reply—on pieces of toilet paper, the margins of newspapers, and anything else he could get his hands on—and smuggled it out to an aide in bits and pieces. Although in the tumble of events then and since, it never got the notice it deserved, it may yet live as a classic expression of the Negro revolution of 1963. Excerpts from the letter, which was addressed to "My Dear Fellow Clergymen":

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." Read more here

Rosa Parks

Montgomery Bus Boycott

A Montgomery, Alabama Sheriff's Department booking photo of Rosa Parks after being arrested.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. Many important figures in the civil rights movement were involved in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and others, as listed below. The boycott caused crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city's black population who were the principal boycotters were also the bulk of the system's paying customers. The campaign lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person, to December 20, 1956, when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Read more here

Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Montgomery, Alabama Sheriff's Department booking photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. after being arrested in the historic Montgomery bus boycott.

Rosa Parks

Lawyer claims fees drained Rosa Parks' estate
Associated Press
July 22, 2011

DETROIT (AP) — A lawyer involved in a long-running dispute over the estate of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks claims that a judge allowed two other lawyers to pile up fees that ate away about two-thirds of the estate's $372,000 cash value.

The financial condition of Parks' estate was outlined in a recent filing with the Michigan Supreme Court by Steven Cohen, who represents Parks' caretaker Elaine Steele and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, the Detroit Free Press reported Thursday.

"Since Mrs. Parks' death ... the court system of her adopted city has embarked on a course to destroy her legacy, bankrupt her institute, shred her estate plan and steal her very name," Cohen said in the filing.

The legal filing contends that Wayne County Probate Judge Freddie Burton Jr. allowed lawyers John Chase Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr. to get fees that drained nearly $243,000 from the estate. Read more here

Malcolm X

malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com

The most complete collection of Malcolm X speeches and interviews ever assembled, The Complete Malcolm X contains more than 12 hours of video, 28 hours of audio, 250 pages of speech transcriptions, over 4,000 pages of FBI files and more: over 40 hours of material in total on one DVD. Read more here

MLK and Malcolm X

Malcolm X
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. His detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, antisemitism, and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history, and in 1998, TIME named The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Read more here 

Peeling Away Multiple Masks
The New York Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 7, 2011

He was a master of reinvention who had as many names as he did identities: Malcolm Little, Homeboy, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Big Red, Satan, Malachi Shabazz, Malik Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and, most famously, Malcolm X. A country bumpkin who became a zoot-suited entertainer who became a petty criminal who became a self-taught intellectual who became a white-hating black nationalist who became a follower of orthodox Islam who became an international figure championing "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people."

In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," Manning Marable — a professor at Columbia University and the director of its Center for Contemporary Black History, who died just last week — vividly chronicles these many incarnations of his subject, describing the "multiple masks" he donned over the years, while charting the complex and contradiction-filled evolution of his political and religious beliefs. The book draws from diaries, letters, F.B.I. files, Web resources and interviews with members of Malcolm X’s inner circle. Read more here

Abraham, Martin and John
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 


"Abraham, Martin and John" is a 1968 song written by Dick Holler and first recorded by Dion. It is a tribute to the memories of icons of social change, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. It was written as a response to the assassinations of King and the younger Kennedy in April and June 1968.

Each of the first three verses features one of the men named in the song's title, for example:

    Has anybody here, seen my old friend Abraham -
    Can you tell me where he's gone?
    He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young
    But I just looked around and he's gone.

After a bridge, the fourth and final verse mentions Robert "Bobby" Kennedy, and ends with a description of him walking over a hill with the other three men. Read more here

National Civil Rights Museum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, is a privately owned complex of museums and historic buildings built around the former Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Major components of the complex on 4.14 acres include a museum which traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1600s to the present, the Lorraine Motel and hotel buildings as well as the Young and Morrow Building at 422 Main Street on the west side of Mulberry up a small hill across the street from the motel which was the site where James Earl Ray initially confessed (and later recanted) to shooting King from a second story bathroom window as well as the Canipe’s Amusement Store at 418 Main Street next door to the rooming house where the alleged murder weapon with Ray's fingerprints was found. Included on the grounds is the brushy lot that stood between the rooming house and the motel where a differing theory says the fatal shot came from a different weapon at ground level in a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers who operated Jim's Grill which opened onto the lot.

The complex is owned by the nonprofit Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation. It is located on the south edge of Downtown Memphis, Tennessee in what is now called the South Main Arts District and is about six blocks east of the Mississippi River. Read more here