SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Honoring King: Creating a Coalition for Social Justice
Jan 19, 2011
The 12th annual King Day at the Dome march and rally at the South Carolina State House on January 17 brought together a coalition of organizations and individuals who are working to fulfill the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They advocated cooperative activism for more jobs, affordable housing, better health care for the poor and disabled, and to oppose drastic cuts for public education, as well as a draconian Arizona styled immigration legislation that will be very costly, financially and morally.
Our event has had the highest attendance of any King Day birthday celebration in the country since 2000, with this year's crowd filling the front plaza and including two busloads from Detroit. More than 50,000 people participated in 2000 in our first such march and rally sponsored by the South Carolina NAACP to protest the Confederate flag flying atop our State House along with the United States' and South Carolina's state flags. In a disrespectful gesture to the massive protest, the South Carolina General Assembly brokered a "compromise" among themselves that moved the rebel flag from atop our state capitol to the Confederate soldier's memorial monument in front of the State House on July1, 2000.
The Confederate flag has been a symbol of white supremacy, waved by the Ku Klux Klan, racist rednecks and assorted devotees of the Confederate morality when they lynched and terrorized black people from the Civil War to the present day. The KKK waved the rebel flag as they burned black churches in South Carolina in the '90s. In 1962 it was placed atop the State House in defiance of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Confederate soldier's monument the rebel flag has remained a visible statement of in-your-face disrespect to people of color. At the rally we renewed the S.C. NAACP's call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds.
Dr. Lonnie Randolph said it was an atrocity to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the union on December 20th in Charleston with a "gala". South Carolina's secession and subsequent firing on Fort Sumter to defend slavery started a war that killed over 600,000 soldiers, and is nothing to celebrate. He declared it is as offensive to black people as it would be to Jewish Americans if we "celebrated" their oppression under Nazis Germany.
The NAACP held a protest march and rally against the secession "celebration" in Charleston and I was in a picture on the front page of the local newspaper participating in the march. On December 29 Dr. Randolph held a media conference that I attended. 3 days later I received a handwritten letter from an unnamed person who signed the letter, "a fairly intelligent redneck who loves South Carolina" and printed "Sons of the Confederacy, Senior Vice President" on the envelope. He began the four page diatribe with, "Mr. Tom Turnipseed, Since you seem to love the black people (Re: Your recent smiling face while Lonnie Randolph did the usual BS on TV and you marching in Charleston) Do you realize the blacks are taking over and whites like you are helping and cheering them on?...They have a truckload of children (without) a daddy so they get a bigger welfare check...the white race creates everything in America". As a life member of the NAACP serving on the SC NAACP's planning committee, I've raised the wrath of racists who have picketed our law office with signs calling me a race traitor.
The immigration issue is also threatening to racists. Dr. King said "We may have come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now." Wade Henderson, CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Coalition spoke at our rally against the immigration legislation pending in South Carolina, calling for coalition action to defeat it.
Passage of the law will require State resources for additional law enforcement personnel, more prison space, the defense of legal challenges. We will lose tourism dollars due to boycotts and lose labor for the tourist and construction industries and to harvest our crops, all while vital government services are cut. Morally, the bill violates our values by jailing peaceful, hard-working people and separating children from their families, as well as by racial profiling.
Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) was on the King Day agenda. HHH members are working to remove the negative stereotyping of homeless and become responsible, productive citizens with jobs, affordable housing and health care.
John Holmes, chairman of Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) quoted Dr. King, "we are all interdependent, all interrelated. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother."
Our interdependent coalition at King Day at the Dome will work for social justice to fulfill Dr. King's legacy.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Tom Turnipseed
Tom Turnipseed (1936-2020) was an attorney, writer and peace activist in Columbia, SC. Tom, who after working on the presidential campaign of the segregationist George C. Wallace in 1968, took a 180-degree turn and became a prominent champion of civil rights. See: Progressive Activist and Longtime Common Dreams Contributor Tom Turnipseed Dead at 83
The 12th annual King Day at the Dome march and rally at the South Carolina State House on January 17 brought together a coalition of organizations and individuals who are working to fulfill the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They advocated cooperative activism for more jobs, affordable housing, better health care for the poor and disabled, and to oppose drastic cuts for public education, as well as a draconian Arizona styled immigration legislation that will be very costly, financially and morally.
Our event has had the highest attendance of any King Day birthday celebration in the country since 2000, with this year's crowd filling the front plaza and including two busloads from Detroit. More than 50,000 people participated in 2000 in our first such march and rally sponsored by the South Carolina NAACP to protest the Confederate flag flying atop our State House along with the United States' and South Carolina's state flags. In a disrespectful gesture to the massive protest, the South Carolina General Assembly brokered a "compromise" among themselves that moved the rebel flag from atop our state capitol to the Confederate soldier's memorial monument in front of the State House on July1, 2000.
The Confederate flag has been a symbol of white supremacy, waved by the Ku Klux Klan, racist rednecks and assorted devotees of the Confederate morality when they lynched and terrorized black people from the Civil War to the present day. The KKK waved the rebel flag as they burned black churches in South Carolina in the '90s. In 1962 it was placed atop the State House in defiance of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Confederate soldier's monument the rebel flag has remained a visible statement of in-your-face disrespect to people of color. At the rally we renewed the S.C. NAACP's call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds.
Dr. Lonnie Randolph said it was an atrocity to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the union on December 20th in Charleston with a "gala". South Carolina's secession and subsequent firing on Fort Sumter to defend slavery started a war that killed over 600,000 soldiers, and is nothing to celebrate. He declared it is as offensive to black people as it would be to Jewish Americans if we "celebrated" their oppression under Nazis Germany.
The NAACP held a protest march and rally against the secession "celebration" in Charleston and I was in a picture on the front page of the local newspaper participating in the march. On December 29 Dr. Randolph held a media conference that I attended. 3 days later I received a handwritten letter from an unnamed person who signed the letter, "a fairly intelligent redneck who loves South Carolina" and printed "Sons of the Confederacy, Senior Vice President" on the envelope. He began the four page diatribe with, "Mr. Tom Turnipseed, Since you seem to love the black people (Re: Your recent smiling face while Lonnie Randolph did the usual BS on TV and you marching in Charleston) Do you realize the blacks are taking over and whites like you are helping and cheering them on?...They have a truckload of children (without) a daddy so they get a bigger welfare check...the white race creates everything in America". As a life member of the NAACP serving on the SC NAACP's planning committee, I've raised the wrath of racists who have picketed our law office with signs calling me a race traitor.
The immigration issue is also threatening to racists. Dr. King said "We may have come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now." Wade Henderson, CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Coalition spoke at our rally against the immigration legislation pending in South Carolina, calling for coalition action to defeat it.
Passage of the law will require State resources for additional law enforcement personnel, more prison space, the defense of legal challenges. We will lose tourism dollars due to boycotts and lose labor for the tourist and construction industries and to harvest our crops, all while vital government services are cut. Morally, the bill violates our values by jailing peaceful, hard-working people and separating children from their families, as well as by racial profiling.
Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) was on the King Day agenda. HHH members are working to remove the negative stereotyping of homeless and become responsible, productive citizens with jobs, affordable housing and health care.
John Holmes, chairman of Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) quoted Dr. King, "we are all interdependent, all interrelated. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother."
Our interdependent coalition at King Day at the Dome will work for social justice to fulfill Dr. King's legacy.
Tom Turnipseed
Tom Turnipseed (1936-2020) was an attorney, writer and peace activist in Columbia, SC. Tom, who after working on the presidential campaign of the segregationist George C. Wallace in 1968, took a 180-degree turn and became a prominent champion of civil rights. See: Progressive Activist and Longtime Common Dreams Contributor Tom Turnipseed Dead at 83
The 12th annual King Day at the Dome march and rally at the South Carolina State House on January 17 brought together a coalition of organizations and individuals who are working to fulfill the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They advocated cooperative activism for more jobs, affordable housing, better health care for the poor and disabled, and to oppose drastic cuts for public education, as well as a draconian Arizona styled immigration legislation that will be very costly, financially and morally.
Our event has had the highest attendance of any King Day birthday celebration in the country since 2000, with this year's crowd filling the front plaza and including two busloads from Detroit. More than 50,000 people participated in 2000 in our first such march and rally sponsored by the South Carolina NAACP to protest the Confederate flag flying atop our State House along with the United States' and South Carolina's state flags. In a disrespectful gesture to the massive protest, the South Carolina General Assembly brokered a "compromise" among themselves that moved the rebel flag from atop our state capitol to the Confederate soldier's memorial monument in front of the State House on July1, 2000.
The Confederate flag has been a symbol of white supremacy, waved by the Ku Klux Klan, racist rednecks and assorted devotees of the Confederate morality when they lynched and terrorized black people from the Civil War to the present day. The KKK waved the rebel flag as they burned black churches in South Carolina in the '90s. In 1962 it was placed atop the State House in defiance of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Confederate soldier's monument the rebel flag has remained a visible statement of in-your-face disrespect to people of color. At the rally we renewed the S.C. NAACP's call to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds.
Dr. Lonnie Randolph said it was an atrocity to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the union on December 20th in Charleston with a "gala". South Carolina's secession and subsequent firing on Fort Sumter to defend slavery started a war that killed over 600,000 soldiers, and is nothing to celebrate. He declared it is as offensive to black people as it would be to Jewish Americans if we "celebrated" their oppression under Nazis Germany.
The NAACP held a protest march and rally against the secession "celebration" in Charleston and I was in a picture on the front page of the local newspaper participating in the march. On December 29 Dr. Randolph held a media conference that I attended. 3 days later I received a handwritten letter from an unnamed person who signed the letter, "a fairly intelligent redneck who loves South Carolina" and printed "Sons of the Confederacy, Senior Vice President" on the envelope. He began the four page diatribe with, "Mr. Tom Turnipseed, Since you seem to love the black people (Re: Your recent smiling face while Lonnie Randolph did the usual BS on TV and you marching in Charleston) Do you realize the blacks are taking over and whites like you are helping and cheering them on?...They have a truckload of children (without) a daddy so they get a bigger welfare check...the white race creates everything in America". As a life member of the NAACP serving on the SC NAACP's planning committee, I've raised the wrath of racists who have picketed our law office with signs calling me a race traitor.
The immigration issue is also threatening to racists. Dr. King said "We may have come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now." Wade Henderson, CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Coalition spoke at our rally against the immigration legislation pending in South Carolina, calling for coalition action to defeat it.
Passage of the law will require State resources for additional law enforcement personnel, more prison space, the defense of legal challenges. We will lose tourism dollars due to boycotts and lose labor for the tourist and construction industries and to harvest our crops, all while vital government services are cut. Morally, the bill violates our values by jailing peaceful, hard-working people and separating children from their families, as well as by racial profiling.
Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) was on the King Day agenda. HHH members are working to remove the negative stereotyping of homeless and become responsible, productive citizens with jobs, affordable housing and health care.
John Holmes, chairman of Homeless Helping Homeless (HHH) quoted Dr. King, "we are all interdependent, all interrelated. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother."
Our interdependent coalition at King Day at the Dome will work for social justice to fulfill Dr. King's legacy.
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.