Tag Archives: MLK

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

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Vote No for School Consolidation March —Sam Allen

Seen on FVCS yesterday. -jsq
On Saturday, October 22, 2011, Friends of Valdosta City Schools are planning a “Vote No for School Consolidation March” at 9:00 am. The March will begin at 9:30 am at the Old Tommy Griner Parking lot (across the street from the Lowndes/Valdosta chamber of commerce – Ashley Street) and end at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Monument at the corner of MLK and Ashley. We will have several speakers to encourage our Community to band together for a Common Cause. Please plan to attend and invite everyone that you know to join us as we tell cuee and chamber that we will not fall for their untruths and misleading ads. Please join in the March for the Cause. Keep in mind that at the end there is no Runoff.

Keep in mind that the Ballot Question does have “Consolidation” on it now, but the answer remains the same. NO! NO! NO!

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Please send to your Friends

-Sam Allen

Make the Industrial Authority be accounted —Tony Daniels at MLK Occupy Valdosta

Tony Daniels called for accountability at the MLK monument:
Stand up! Make the Bank of America be accounted. Make the Industrial Authority be accounted. Make the United States government be accounted.

Here’s the video:


Make the Industrial Authority be accounted —Tony Daniels at MLK 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

CUEE radio ad helps alienate Black Crow radio host

About that CUEE radio ad, Rob Harder wrote for Valdosta Today today, “Morgan Freeman” CUEE Ad Fires Up Debate
A new radio ad from the Community Unification for Educational Excellence, Inc (CUEE) has sparked a lot of controversy in the few days it has been running in local media.

…

The ad, voiced by an actor who sounds like Morgan Freeman but is not, encourages Valdosta city residents to vote “Yes” on school consolidation November 8th. The commercial claims that Valdosta schools are “once again segregated” and ties the success of the vote to Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision.

Callers to the Chris Beckham Show, which airs from 3PM to 6PM each weekday on WVGA 105.9 FM, were overwhelming in their condemnation of the ad.

Yes, that’s what Chris Beckham told me when I talked to him today. I’ll be on his radio show on WVGA 105.9, tomorrow, about 4PM.

You can hear the radio ad in the Valdosta Today article.

The article contains this priceless quote by the real Morgan Freeman, Continue reading →

NAACP on MLK on War on Drugs

I hate to repeat a preacher, but it’s Sunday, and Robert Rooks wrote for NAACP 24 August 2011 U.S. Approach to War on Drugs Ignores Dr. King’s Lessons on Justice, Compassion.
After forty years of the war on drugs, America continues to have laws that stratify society based on race and class and continues to ignore Dr. King’s lessons on justice, compassion and love.

My favorite quote from Dr. King speaks to the heart of the problem with America’s criminal justice system. “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

America’s criminal justice system is reckless and discriminate. America has five percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Blacks are incarcerated at four to five times the rate of whites for drug crimes, even though the majority of those who use and sell drugs are white. The majority of those incarcerated are people who have a history with mental health and substance abuse.

Not only does incarceration impact individuals but it undermines families,

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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 →

“It’s an anti-American law” —Carlos Santana in Georgia

Carroll Rogers wrote in the AJC 15 May 2011, Santana blasts Georgia immigration bill before Braves game:
Legendary rock guitarist Carlos Santana, in town to be honored for a “Beacon of Change” award at Sunday’s MLB Civil Rights Game at Turner Field, called the state’s new immigration law “anti-American.”

Santana took his turn at the podium on the field in a pre-game ceremony before the Braves-Phillies game to criticize the immigration bill just signed into law by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal Friday.

“I represent the human race,” the Mexican-born Carlos Santana said. “The people of Arizona, the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The Georgia immigration law, HB 87, cracks down on illegal immigration by increasing enforcement powers and requiring many employers to check the immigration status of new hires.

And this is just the start of what’s going to happen to Georgia as long as that law is in effect.

But what do you really think, Carlos? Continue reading →

News Media Whiteout Machines. –George Rhynes

The previous post may be evidence for what George wrote here. -jsq
Never, never, ever be shocked by Valdosta and South Georgia News Media Whiteout Machines. This includes local Television, News Papers, Radio, and our elected officials that are on the wrong side of history. This pattern and practice of keeping citizens deaf; dumb, and blind to the times as to what takes place at public meetings in own community and in the State of Georgia is no secret.

Omissions such as these;

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