Dr. Kings legacy is manifested in moving to evolve and eliminate institutionalized racism in America. From the moral standpoint to the practical community organizing standpoint, it was about nonviolence and rightfully so. It was about the first amendment to the Constitution which gives all of us the right to peacefully assemble and address our grievances. At that time the power structure began to attack, murder, shoot, kill and brutalize peaceful demonstrators. In other words, they were violating their constitutional, democratic, civil and human rights to organize, unify and educate the people. Dr King was the first black leader to inspire me, Bobby Seale, in 1962 at the Oakland Auditorium. I was a student with a full-time night job on the Gemini missile program. In that auditorium, I sat in a sea of seven thousand people who had come to hear Dr. King speak about what we had to do about people of color being discriminated against by companies all across America. It was a time when I had just begun to digest material about our historical struggle for civil-human rights. Dr. King went on to explain America’s rampant discrimination telling us how we had to organize to boycott many different companies, specifically bread companies who refuse to hire people of color. He went on to say that we were going to boycott Lagendorf and Kilpatrick bread companies here in the San Francisco Oakland bay area and the Wonder Bread Company. We were going to boycott them so consistently and profoundly that the Wonder bread company will wonder where their money went. All seven thousand of us stood up applauding and raving. The next person to inspire me was none other than Nelson Mandela. King helped change America’s conscience, not only about civil rights but also about economic justice, poverty and war. As an inexperienced young pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, King was reluctantly thrust into the leadership of the bus boycott. During the 382-day boycott, King was arrested and abused and his home was bombed, but he emerged as a national figure and honed his leadership skills. In 1957 he helped launch the SCLC to spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local campaigns in Selma, Birmingham and other cities, and sought to keep the fractious civil rights movement together, including the NAACP, Urban League, SNCC, CORE and SCLC. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled more than 6 million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times and was arrested at least twenty times while preaching the gospel of nonviolence. Today King’s birthday is a national holiday and his name adorns schools and street signs. But in his day the establishment considered King a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and vilified in the media. The struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for economic and social justice. During the 1960’s, King became increasingly committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. He was in Memphis in 1968 to support striking sanitation workers when he was assassinated. In 1964, at 35, King was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Some civil rights activists worried that his opposition to the Vietnam War, announced in 1967, would create a backlash against civil rights, but instead it helped turned the tide of public opinion against the war. When I look at Dr. Kings legacy and what we stood up for, the amount of people that were killed in the civil rights protests and later in my organization where 28 Black Panther Party members were killed in attacks from the police who were trying to terrorize us out of existence, when I look at that, I have a very great affinity for Dr. King and everything he inspired me to be. All Power To All The People! Bobby Seale bobbyseale =======
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 02:06:52 +0000