Bleeding Edge

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, would have been 91 years old if he were alive today…

That is provided that he had not been assassinated on April 4th of 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Yet, he did, and now through Covid-19, many other activists who had fought long and hard for Civil rights for all — have passed away.

Martin Luther King died fighting for the same thing that the protesters in 300 American cities fight today for the same Civil Rights — after the George Floyd’s lynching by the Police.

Great Civil Rights leaders who fought and died this year are the ones bellow — to whom we owe a debt of Gratitude for their work since they fought to liberate African Americans, and many others. Especially the most affected Minorities that suffer the present day tyranny and mental slavery of racism, and discrimination.

These people fought for all of us, as well as for Affirmative Action, and now that all old people are reaching the end of their natural lives, and yet these men and women died this past year and need to be remembered for their good works:

• Juanita Abernathy, 87, of Atlanta, campaigned, marched and organized for voting rights and school integration in the 1950s and ’60s. She was the wife of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy.

• Unita Blackwell, 86, of Biloxi, Mississippi, also pressed for voting rights. In 1976 she became the first black woman to be elected a mayor in Mississippi when voters chose her to lead Mayersville.

• Leah Chase, 96, was best known as a Creole chef who owned Dooky Chase’s restaurant in New Orleans, but her eatery also was a place where civil rights activists ate and discussed strategy.

• John Conyers, 90, of Detroit, was a Democrat who holds the record for longest-serving black lawmaker in Congress. He first was elected in 1964 and was a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.

• Elijah Cummings, 68, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, helped integrate a Baltimore swimming pool as a preteen while whites attacked him with bottles and rocks.

• Damon J. Keith, 96, of Detroit, went to law school after being forced to the back of the bus when he returned home from World War II. He served in the federal judiciary for more than 50 years.

• Baxter Leach, 79, of Memphis, was a leader in the 1968 sanitation workers strike that brought King to the Tennessee city. He carried one of the “I Am a Man” placards while marching to City Hall.

• John Walker, 82, of Little Rock, Arkansas, was a lawyer and state representative who worked to desegregate Little Rock schools and brought civil rights cases against private businesses.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. appears on one TV screen and then another and another as his impassioned voice wells up.

Those iconic words, “I Have a Dream,” reverberate long after you’ve heard them. It’s an idyllic moment from 1963’s March on Washington and at odds with the gritty reality that King lived. Stabbed, stoned and jailed nearly 30 times, he led the civil rights movement for only a dozen or so years.

Since his death in 1968, many have stepped up to carry on his legacy. Here are a few of them, who since the mid 1960s, helped many African Americans to find their path to the voting booth, even though they were obstructed by literacy tests, poll taxes and intimidation.

After a five-day, 54-mile protest from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, in which marchers such as future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, were bloodied and bruised and a minister was killed, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet voter suppression persists, same as systemic and endemic RACISM, discrimination, and police brutality as well as White Supremacy and the famously undying redneck’s naked White Trash petty racism and the passive aggressive racism of the passive-aggressive liberal whites and the elites of the liberal wealthy states of the coastal cities and rich Cadillac fake liberals of the Democratic party…

One brilliant Civil Rights leader now can be found in the person of Dorceta Taylor, 62 who always had this to say about Martin Luther King:
“In King’s day, we fought to drink from the same fountain. Today we fight to drink the same quality water,” says Dorceta Taylor, who has a doctorate in environmental sociology. She’s a professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability in Ann Arbor.

The campus is an hour’s drive south of the predominantly African American city of Flint, Michigan, where residents have suffered toxic lead levels in the water since 2013. King often spoke out against pollution, overcrowding and the need for parks — issues that today would be considered a call for environmental justice.

Even the Montgomery bus boycott ties into this, Taylor points out: It ushered in a year of carpooling.

So that Flint residents feel that same sense of self-sufficiency, Taylor provides grants for gardens, allowing them to grow some of their own food. She also secures scholarships for students studying the environment at her university, knowing one day they will take the reins.

And yet those years led to voting rights legislation, desegregated facilities throughout the South and an awareness that, left unattended, America’s deep racial and economic wounds would continue to fester. When his home was bombed in 1956, he put haters on notice: “If anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.”

Another Civil Rights leader of today, is the natural leader of people and preacher, Rev William Barber, who was just 4 years old and living in the Midwest when King visited the Mississippi Delta and saw a teacher divide up an apple while trying to feed eight children. The hunger and misery King witnessed inspired the Poor People’s March on Washington: a caravan of more than a dozen covered wagons — with slogans such as “Feed the Poor” painted on the side — that traveled from Marks, Mississippi, to the nation’s capital for a six-week protest.

Barber nurtured this seed that King sowed, cochairing the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The organization plans its own March on Washington this year, on June 20.

Like King, Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, is known for his compelling oratory, decorated civil rights record and inclusive vision for humanity.

“Prophets believe that what they proclaim on any day can be transformed into real action,” Barber says.

Another Civil Rights leader is Patrisse Cullors, an artist, activist and cofounder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, says that people often see Martin Luther King as a “superhero.” But his everyday roles as a community organizer, father and husband move her the most.

The mother of a 4-year-old son named Shine, Cullors is a former senior fellow with the MomsRising organization, where she wrote about maternal mortality. Pregnancy-related deaths for African American women over 30 are four to five times higher than for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Like King, whose acts of civil disobedience often landed him behind bars, Cullors has long been outspoken about the need to overhaul the criminal justice system, particularly around its treatment of black and brown people. Her initiative to reform Los Angeles jails will be put to a countywide vote March 3.

Another is Rashad Robinson, who remembers that in Martin Luther King’s day, people relied on word of mouth to promote campaigns such as the 1960 sit-ins that ended lunch counter and restaurant segregation across 26 Southern cities. But as head of Color of Change, Rashad Robinson and his team update old-school organizing, connecting with their million-plus members via social media and turning around online petitions quickly to press corporate and government leaders to take action.

Color of Change backed the successful passage of a New Jersey bill prohibiting discrimination on the basis of hairstyle to protect African Americans’ economic and civil rights. Organizers also are in the midst of circulating an online petition to end inhumane conditions at a Mississippi prison and are educating African Americans on the importance of participating in the census.

Before Color of Change, Robinson, of New York City, was senior director of programs for GLAAD, formerly called the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and he continues to explore how racial justice and the LGBTQ movements can work in solidarity.

One other Civil Rights leader and noteworthy African American Leader is Bryan Stevenson, who works at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. As a lawyer, Bryan Stevenson and his team have won reversals, relief or release for more than 135 prisoners who were wrongly condemned on death row.

Sometimes Stevenson takes a break to visit a sanctuary that is walking distance from his office. At this church, now called Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, King joined forces with the Women’s Political Council to stage the Montgomery bus boycott.

Back in 1955, African Americans swore off the city’s segregated buses to demand equal treatment for equal fare. Stevenson has advocated for more than 30 years on behalf of the poor — often African American — who lack the resources to secure equal justice.

In 2018, he opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also in Montgomery. His passion for his lifesaving work is showcased in the motion picture that came out late last year, Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. It is based on Stevenson’s 2014 best-selling memoir of the same name.

And there are a lot more Civil Rights leaders out there that take their inspiration from Martin Luther King and bring about change that all voters have long said they want.

Simple things like access to affordable health care are one of their top priorities, and when the Cheetos Man slashed access to affordable Health Care for many millions of Americans — it was when came the greatest health crisis to hit America and the World, in memory.

Indeed, nothing like Covid-19 has ever hit our world and the is certainly the worst pandemic to emerge in our midst for many many generations of people…

But the coronavirus pandemic is not just a complex issue — but it is a Civil Rights issue at best, because as of early July, COVID-19 had stricken more than 2.9 million people in the U.S. and cost nearly 130,000 American lives — predominantly amongst people of Color.

And of course, since no one sane enough is expecting for it to be contained before Election Day — we best prepare for some major disruption.

Yet, at the same time, the pandemic has sidelined tens of millions of people of color and especially poor workers and the poorest of the poor, as it threatens the future of countless small and medium sized businesses, that are either owned or operated by minorities and people of color…

And then, as if this wasn’t bad enough — in late May, came the third national crisis, when hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages took to the streets after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the racist Minneapolis police force — that publicly lynched this man, having been emboldened by the racist rhetoric of our errant President the Orange man extraordinaire…

George Floyd, was an African American man, and a peaceful person, who was arrested without protest, and then was murdered by the criminal Minneapolis Police, in the middle of the street and all completely in public view.

George Floyd was taken form us, unjustly and prematurely, over a questionable $20 dollar bill, when a Minneapolis police officer pinned his head down in the gutter, by squashing the neck of George Floyd, and thus asphyxiating him — on purpose.

This murdered had a badge that allowed him to do what he did, and thus murdered George Floyd by keeping his knee pressed deep under the weight of a 260 pound muscled man, deep on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.

He did this, while four other police officers assisted in this very public lynching of an unarmed and handcuffed man, and all that transpired under the gaze of hundreds of people (sheeple) who were afraid to get involved…. and yet took plenty of video to document this public murder by the people who are tasked with keeping us safe.

So, will it still be health care that drives voters in their election decisions this November? Will the cries for criminal justice reform keep up until the election? Will that iconic phrase from campaigns past — “It’s the economy, stupid” — resonate again? Or, as older voters go to the polls in what’s expected to be record numbers, will they focus less on individual issues and more broadly on leadership and vision?

Voters are evaluating candidates through a different lens than they might have absent the pandemic or racial-justice protests.

Let’s face it, the landscape has changed permanently, with the pivotal issue in this campaign now being Civil Rights, Integrity and Honesty.
Because now with the pandemic, it’s even more important to have this conversation about Racism and Civil Rights going forward — and to honestly discuss how are we going to deal with this thing going forward…

People now want candidates who can express clearly that everybody in America should be treated equally, fairly and with justice.

And yet, that very message is not being clearly articulated now, although this election is going to be dominated by the debate over police reform.

Still, health care is likely to remain a top-tier issue, particularly for senior voters, because health care is always a predominant issue and passionate electoral issue, especially now that the pandemic, makes people even more interested in the belief that health care should be decoupled from employment and should be universal.

This is especially important right now, because as of July 2020, more than 40 million Americans are unemployed, and upwards of 30 million more people could lose their employer-based health insurance, due to the failed economy and the desperate economic situation for the Minorities and the Minority owned businesses.

Ironically, health care is becoming a bipartisan issue, yet now it has become a rather more polarizing issue because all the minorities suffer whereas the white folks are impervious to it.

Still very many folks who identify as center-left or Democrats are talking more about the public health and safety concerns related to the virus — while those who are center-right or Republican are more concerned about this big gorilla being an economic concern…

Perhaps, the tug of war, between the haves and the have-nots, wanting to get back to work and the importance of letting science drive public-health decisions for the wealthy elites, will make all the difference in these elections and beyond…

And of course, we need science to guide us as we bring the economy back — yet, obviously, we have to bring it back, or the whole country is going to go bankrupt, and thus while some voters are zeroing in on candidates who offer future solutions — we all need to look for those that woill bring the future solutions, NOW and into the present.

We need to ask what are we going to do NOW, so that the next time there’s a virus like this, we will be more prepared.

And if somebody who is running needs to explain how they are going to have a plan in place for other pandemics — is not the way to answer that question…

Best tell mw how and what have you done now for solutions, instead of asking me to wait and see if your plan will work next time around…

Because preparing for the next one, while allowing the one we ar facing now — fester — is a Fool’s Erarnd.

And that means electing leaders who can work with both sides of the aisle, like an Independent only can.

That is why now, people want someone who’s gonna put our country first — not themselves and not their party first.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

For example, the candidate I’d vote for is going to have to put more priority on the minorities, as well as on the older and more fragile populations all across the United States of ours.