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The Guardian
Tributes to Martin Luther King Jr merged with protests against police violence across the US on Monday, as political leaders, community activists and demonstrators marked a federal holiday by commemorating the civil rights leader.Thousands took to streets in New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, Oakland and elsewhere for #reclaimMLK marches. The gatherings ranged from relatively small – Reuters estimated 40 in Oakland, California – to record breaking, in Colorado, where the Denver Post estimated 30,000 people turned out.
The Rev Al Sharpton led vigils at sites in New York City where police officers and unarmed black men have been killed in recent months. He was joined at an event in Harlem by the city’s mayor, Bill De Blasio, where both addressed the tensions between police and the wider community.
“We are children, we are grandchildren, of the King generation,” De Blasio said, to a standing ovation at the National Action Network in Harlem.
Al Jazeera America
Black leaders around the country are using Martin Luther King Day to try and turn the tragedies of 2014 into action. While last year’s Martin Luther King Day rallies focused on voting rights and economic inequality, police violence against black men is taking center stage this year.In 2014, the police killings of unarmed black men Eric Garner on Staten Island, New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot in Cleveland while holding a nonlethal pellet gun, sparked months-long protests, police crackdowns and 24-7 media coverage. The deaths not only highlighted the often fraught relationship between police and people of color but also wide disparities in the perception of race relations in America.
"For us Michael Brown's killing represents a deeper crisis in the country around policing, prisons and criminal justice," said Libero Della Piana, senior organizer at Alliance for a Just Society, a national network of racial and economic justice organizations.
There was also additional evidence in 2014 that income inequality is a growing problem in the U.S. According to Pew Research Center, new research shows that the median wealth of white families was 13 times higher than that of black families.
The Guardian
The Rev Al Sharpton will lead a caravan of buses to sites in New York City where police officers and unarmed black men have been killed in recent months, hours after US vice-president Joe Biden spoke about the tensions between police and minorities in some communities.Biden spoke in Wilmington, Delaware, at a breakfast honoring Martin Luther King, and made a call for unity, following the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson.
“Men often hate each other because they fear each other,” Biden said, quoting King, according to the Associated Press. “They fear each other because they do not know each other. They do not know each other because they cannot communicate, and they cannot communicate because they are separated.”
“We have to bridge that separation … particularly today between police and the community that exists in some places.”
Biden, who spoke at the Organization of Minority Women’s annual Martin Luther King breakfast, said: “There’s no reason on earth we cannot repair this breach.”
Reuters
Tributes to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were held around the United States on Monday as protests over the treatment of minorities by law enforcement rolled on across the country.Observers of Martin Luther King Jr. Day have this year linked the federal holiday to a rallying cry in recent months during demonstrations over police brutality: "Black lives matter."
In a pre-dawn rally in Oakland, California on Monday, about 40 people converged on the home of Mayor Libby Schaaf, calling for harsher punishment of police who use violence against civilians. They chalked outlines of bodies on the tree-lined street, played recordings of King's speeches and projected an image of the slain civil rights leader with the words "Black lives matter," on the mayor's garage door.
Reuters
Fifty-four years after nine young black men became the first U.S. civil rights protesters to serve jail time for sitting at an all-white lunch counter, surviving members of the group will return to a South Carolina courtroom this month to be exonerated of their crimes.Their "jail, no bail" strategy helped galvanize the fight against racial inequality in the South and became a model for other protesters. But the "Friendship Nine," as the men became known, endured personal hardships for taking the bold stand.
They say the push to clear their names so long after the Jan. 31, 1961, sit-in in Rock Hill will have little effect on their lives. Still, they welcome the message it sends at a time of sharpened focus on U.S. race relations following white police killings of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York.
NPR
In Peter Maginot's sixth-grade class, the teacher is white, but all of his students are black. They're young and they're honestly concerned that what happened to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner could happen to them."Who can tell me the facts that we know about Mike Brown?" Maginot asks the class at Shabazz Public School Academy, an afro-centric school in Lansing, Mich.
One student speaks up, "Mike Brown, he was shot and killed by a white man." Another adds, "He didn't have any weapons, and he was walking down the street." A third student raises his hand and says, "He was a teenager."
