Tag Archives: Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK and pipeline opposition

The fossil fuel opposition is the child and grandchild of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.


With their nonviolence, truth, and action as a model, we shall overcome.

Bill McKibben, The Guardian, 25 August 2011,

Martin Luther King’s legacy and the power of nonviolent civil disobedience:
In opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline, demonstrators are getting a sense of the civil rights leader’s courage,

Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really
understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in
the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity
it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest: First,
it made Keystone XL “ the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re
trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar
sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico “ into a
national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the
route of the prospective pipeline who were organising against it.
(And with good reason: Continue reading →

ALEC, Trayvon Martin, CCA’s private prisons, and charter schools?

What’s the connection between

the Florida law that’s letting
the killer of Trayvon Martin hide, the

private prisons CCA
runs in Georgia and other states, and HB 797, the Georgia charter schools
bill
that’s on the floor today for Senate debate today?

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday for the NYTimes,

Lobbyists, Guns and Money,

ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization


— that is, on turning the provision of public services, from
schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the
most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online
education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections
Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved
with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for
limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large
extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized
government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer
dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In
short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is
about expanding crony capitalism.

And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC
promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories,
what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools,
for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the
way of educational achievement.

Same as private prisons.
The only real benefit goes to

private prison company executives and shareholders.

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony
capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal
justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to
protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap
from a larger prison population.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

And today we have an organized threat to justice everywhere.
That threat is called ALEC.

-jsq

Vote NO March & Rally

Text received Monday, poster received today. -jsq

From: JC Cunningham

Please read the message by Rev. Rose and then mark your calendar for
Oct. 22, 2011. On that day we will have the largest March/Rally in the


history of Valdosta. This will be the March that will show
everyone in Georgia and America that we the Citizens of
Lowndes-Valdosta, know how to come together and we will no longer stand
for the Lies, Greed, and Disrespect from Cuee. We will for once and
for all tell Cuee and the Chamber that “Our Children are not for Sale”
This March will show Cuee and the Chamber that when we all stand
together; Democrats, Republicans, NAACP, SCLC, White, Black, Hispanic,
Rich, Poor, Young and Old we show what true democracy is all
about. Cuee has tried everything to break our spirit with negative
campaign ads and misleading information, but they did not. They
cannot break the solidarity that has grown throughout this community
over the past two months.

To watch Republicans and Democrats set aside their

Continue reading →

Vote No on Unification —Sam Allen @ MLK Monument

Sam Allen spoke at the MLK Monument to say:

Make your taxes go up, and you’ll end up paying more taxes.
This is just one way
that people making minimum wage are going to lose their home.
Don’t be fooled!
If you’re a voting resident of Valdosta,
vote no on November the eighth on school unification.
Thank you.





Picture of Sam Allen at MLK Monument in Valdosta

by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange

Hm, CUEE (or somebody) did

a radio ad with a fake Morgan Freeman pushing consolidation,
using MLK’s name.
Here’s a picture and video of Sam Allen in front of the MLK monument,
If FVCS or somebody wanted to use them….
(As usual, just remember to cite LAKE as the source.)

Here’s

the video:




Vote No on Unification —Sam Allen @ MLK Monument

We are the 99%,

Marching to Occupy Valdosta, Occupy Valdosta,

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 14 October 2011.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Marching for rights —Mario Bartoletti @ MLK Monument Occupy Valdosta



Mario Bartoletti stood up at the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument in Valdosta and said to Occupy Valdosta:

I’m just shy of 79
and I’ve been out here marching all the way today,
and I’ll tell you why.


When I was your age, we were marching for civil rights.
We made it.
Now we’re marching for another kind of rights,
and I guarantee we’re going to make it!
I want you to promise, when you’re my age,
you’re going to be leading a demonstration
for those who march for those kinds of rights.

Here’s

the video:




Marching for rights —Mario Bartoletti @ MLK Monument Occupy Valdosta

We are the 99%,

Marching to Occupy Valdosta, Occupy Valdosta,

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 14 October 2011.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Marching to Occupy Valdosta 14 October 2011



Will someone pick up that sign?
As you can see in the

playlist, why yes, someone did!

More than 100 people (estimates ranged from 110 to 150) went

Marching to Occupy Valdosta.





Tony Daniels and Freddie Richardson carry the Occupy Valdosta banner

They marched more than
three miles from Drexel Park to Bank of America, where they noted
BoA got bailed out and we got left out and recommended withdrawing
your money.
Then to MLK Park, where many people spoke on a variety of subjects
ranging from stand together, to make the Industrial Authority be accounted,
to vote No on School Consolidation on November 8th,
to if MLK was alive he would be here today,
to marching for rights for a lifetime,
to no private prison,
to tax the rich,
and and of course

come back here (MLK Park) tomorrow (Sat 15 Oct) at 11AM!
Then to the VDT (where the Assistant Managing Editor was surprised by a cheer) and the Chamber (where the President didn’t care for a thesaurus lesson); more on all those stops later.




Marching to Occupy Valdosta, 14 October 2011:

Drexel Park, Bank of America, MLK Park, VDT, Chamber of Commerce.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman and John S. Quarterman

for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Videos are still uploading, so check back later.
I’ll also blog more about specific events along the way.

-jsq

NAACP paradigm shift

Why does it matter that the NAACP wants an end to the War on Drugs?

Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote for the Miami Herald 30 July 2011,

NAACP’s paradigm shift on ending the Drug War



Here’s why this matters. Or, more to the point, why it matters more than
if such a statement came from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. The NAACP is
not just the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It
is also its most conservative.

Conservative as in:

…denoting a propensity toward caution and a distrust of the bold, the
risky, the new. And that’s the NAACP all over.



…there has always been something determinedly middle class and cautious
about the NAACP. This is the group whose then-leader, Roy Wilkins,
famously detested Martin Luther King for his street theatrics.

For that group, then, to demand an end to the Drug War represents a
monumental sea change.

How monumental?

Continue reading →

“a conflict of interest at its core” —church group on private prisons

Another Sunday, another church group against private prisons.
This time, it includes ex-prisoners, and it went to the lion’s den:
a CCA shareholder meeting.

Marian Wright Edelman wrote 13 December 2010,

Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry:



A few months ago a group of earnest and determined stockholders traveled
together by bus from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, to
attend a shareholders’ meeting for the Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country. The
group included ex-offenders who now each hold one share of stock in the
same prison company that once held them captive, and they attended the
meeting in the hopes of sharing their perspective on how the privatized
prison industry can better serve society by rehabilitating inmates,
rather than just serving its own profits by perpetuating the prison cycle.

The group, part of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour, is named
Strength to Love, after the title of one of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s sermon collections. Members explain their mission this way:

Continue reading →

Another Sunday, another preacher against private prisons

Neal Peirce wrote:

And Sicilia had a stern judgment to make — as King did in his time —
about the U.S. government: “Since the war was unleashed as a means to
exterminate (drug trafficking), the United States, which is the grand
consumer of these toxic substances, has not done anything to support us.”

This was about Javier Sicilia and the war on drugs in Mexico.

MLK? Harsh? Maybe the writer is thinking about this speech,

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence:



My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three
years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to
offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that
social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But
they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own
nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems,
to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,
and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence
of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly
to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own
government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government,
for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,
I cannot be silent.

One year later to the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead.
This is what he died for:

Continue reading →

Michael Bryant: “the appalling silence”

Pastor Michael Bryant expands on
his previous letter.

-jsq

Dear Pastors and fellow laborers in the Gospel of our Lord and Savior,

I was born and raised here in Lowndes County. Today I am as disturbed as I
was in 1973 when I, along with 42 other students, four ministers and their
wives, were jailed for protesting unfair treatment of students in the
Lowndes County School System. We were arrested while standing in the
parking lot awaiting to enter the building for a meeting called by
the Lowndes County Board of Education at their office on St. Augustine
Road. The meeting was supposed to be a good faith gesture designed to
mediate an amicable solution to the picketing which had been in process for
nearly six months. After being arrested, we were moved from Big 12 in a
prison truck in the dead of night. We were to be housed in the Cook County
jail and none of our parents knew where we were. When we exited the truck,
both sides of the walk way upon which we had to walk were lined with
numerous State Troopers and other Law Enforcement officers sporting riot
gear and shotguns. On the following day they refused to feed us breakfast.
We began to complain and the judge came upstairs dressed in his robe. He
said “I want you to stop making noise, and if you don’t, I can make you
stop.”

When we complained again, the cell in which we were jailed was sprayed
down with tear gas. We had one toilet and one sink in which to clear our
eyes. These are facts that went unreported by the papers. In fact they
said we were rabble rousers. The late Ralph Harrington signed all our
bonds, and we went through a lengthy trial, represented by the late Mr. C.
B. King, Sr., of Albany, GA. At the close of the trial all charges were
dismissed and expunged from our records.

As a student then, I witnessed the appalling silence of men and women of
God who preached the hell out of people on Sundays, collected their checks,
and went home untouched by the happenings in the community. This was much
like the appalling silence of ministers who sat on the sidelines while Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., placed his life on the line for “the least of
these.”

Some years ago, Rev. Floyd Rose, two of my sisters and several other

Continue reading →