30th Annual Martin Luther King Jr., Rally and March

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Committee announces the 30th annual region-wide Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration on Monday, January 16, 2012, beginning with Workshops (9:30am-11am), Rally (11am-12:30pm) and the March beginning at a new time of 12:30pm. This year's theme is "30th Anniversary Celebration: Recapturing MLK Jr.'s Revolutionary Spirit!"

This year we will march from Garfield High School to the Federal Building via Union St. & Madison St. We will march Monday- rain or snow. Lunch will be provided FREE following the march in Garfield's Commons area. We look foward to seeing you for Monday!

Do you want to have a table at the MLK celebration? The opportunity to have a table is on a FIRST come, FIRST served basis. You must bring your own chairs and table to have a table in the hallway at Garfield. Doors open at 8am. No charge for having a table.

Seattle has one of the largest annual Martin Luther King Day Celebrations in the U.S. We honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his work toward racial equality and economic justice for all people, for his commitment to nonviolence, and for his stand against war and militarism.

"The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated."

-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

History of the MLK Celebration Committee

The Martin Luther King Celebration Committee is composed of dozens of grassroots, labor, business, minority, and progressive community organizations and volunteers from throughout the Puget Sound region. Annually, these groups come together and organize our community's largest tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

History of the MLK Celebration Committee
The Martin Luther King Celebration Committee is composed of dozens of grassroots, labor, business, minority, and progressive community organizations and volunteers from throughout the Puget Sound region. Annually, these groups come together and organize our community's largest tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This year marks our 29th year honoring Dr. King's legacy.

Membership on the Committee is open. Individuals become voting members at their second meeting of the year (see our Principles of Unity). The chair of the Committee is Larry Gossett. Mr. Gossett has been chair of the Committee for 14 years. The Committee has many longtime members who have been planning and participating in planning of the march for over 25 years. A few longtime members are Lacy Steele, Eddie Rye Jr., Oscar Esaon Jr.,and Bob Barnes. The Committee has many labor unions that support the annual march and rally. A few members who serve on the Committee who are also active in labor unions: Abdul-aleem Ahmed, Verlene Jones, Jacquie Jones-Walsh, and James Davis. We are proud to have a broad based coalition of members.

Every year the MLK Celebration Committee identifies a local issue facing citizens here in King County, the only geographic jurisdiction named in Dr. King's honor. Then we organize a campaign to draw attention to the issue. Each year, thousands of local citizens participate in one of the biggest and most racially diverse rallies and marches ever held in Seattle. Here are some of the themes from recent years:

2010: JUSTICE NOW! Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Education!
2009: YES WE CAN: Change Begins Now!
2008: Let Freedom Ring: End Racism, Poverty and War!
2007: Solidarity for Peace, Human Rights, and Economic Justice!
2006: Racism, Poverty, War: Iraq, Katrina, No More!
2005: Speak Truth to Power: End Racial Disparity Now!
2004: March in MLK's Footsteps: Justice Begins at Home!
2003: MLK's Call to Conscience: Support the Poor, No More War!

The theme usually speaks to the need for justice in all facets of our society: locally, nationally, and globally. Through workshops, a rally, and a march organized around this theme, we will keep the spotlight on our responsibility to correct the injustices in our world, from our criminal justice system to our public schools, to senseless military misadventures that threaten human rights and rob our communities of funds. This year's program will inform and empower those who attend.

This is the 30th year the committee will bring together people from every community and walk of life to commemorate the life of Dr. King and celebrate his birthday.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. returns to nation’s capitol

The DePaulia
By Jerae Duffin
Published: Monday, October 24
Updated: Friday, October 21, 2011


Thousands gathered Oct. 16 in West Potomac Park in Washington D.C. for the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Despite its delay due to hurricane Irene in August, President Barack Obama led the dedication ceremony along with notable civil rights leaders from across the country.

The 30-foot granite monument is located on the National Mall, adjacent to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and sits on a line directly between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. The monument's official address is 1964 Independence Ave, a reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which Dr. King played a major role.

It took several years for completion, starting in 1996 when Congress allowed King's former fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, to establish the memorial. Nearly $120 million were raised from the "Band Together to Build a Dream" donations used to create the site.

"The tribute is long overdue," said Laura Washington, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. "The monument is a sculpture. I hope that people will capture the spirit of what King represented. The spirit of equality."

Nearly 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream Speech" in Washington in an effort to push for racial equality and to rally against discrimination against African Amerians.

"King was the face of the civil rights movement," said Dr. Howard Lindsey, assistant professor of History at DePaul. "You can't talk about civil rights without talking about Martin Luther King."

Dr. Lindsey teaches African American history courses at DePaul including the History of the Civil Rights Movement and of the Black Power Movement.

"I do wish, though, that the monument somehow gave some recognition to the thousands who made up the movement," said Dr. Kohli, assistant professor of African Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. Dr. Kohli recently discussed some of Dr. King's speeches with his African American and African Diaspora and Culture class.

When asked about the dedication of the memorial, Kohli said, "I thought it was about time."

It took 15 years for Dr. King's monument to arrive to Washington, but in the words of President Obama at the ceremony, "This is a day that would not be denied."

"President Obama did a great job at catering Martin Luther King's message to the issues we are facing today," said Josh Perez, a junior in Political Science and Communication at DePaul. Perez also has campaigned for President Obama for the upcoming 2012 election as a community organizer in the first ward of Chicago.

In 1963, King arrived in Washington, D.C. to speak before thousands at the Lincoln memorial, but today he sits near it again. Alongside his memorial are the embedded words: "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

2011 marks yet another milestone in Dr. King's accomplishments and is a testament of the continuing power of his legacy in shaping the national psyche of the United States.

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Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s other half

By Rev. Barbara A. Reynolds
Posted 10/21/2011
The Root DC


The recent dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. monument offered a splendid tribute, crowned by President Barack Obama linking his presidency to the martyred human rights leader.

The centerpiece of the monument on the National Mall is a towering 30 foot statue of Dr. King carved out of stone. It is a grandiose salute to a man who--without an army, weapons or a national treasury--commanded a war so unlike that of Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who are enshrined in memorials nearby.

But there is a glaring omission: any mention of the words and deeds of Coretta Scott King

Dr. King commanded a spiritual army that helped liberate the heart and soul of America from its deepest hatred and molded it into a liberation movement for freedom and dignity that resounds around the world.

Coretta King was his other half. She did more than anyone else to advance his legacy. And, dare I say, if it were not for this woman by his side, his legacy would never have risen to such heroic proportions.

Somewhere on that vast four acres there should be a statue, a bust, a plaque or something showing that she was a co-partner in this great freedom movement. (She died on Jan. 30, 2006.) Why not a mention of her on the monuments wall of great quotes? He once said, “In every campaign if Coretta was not with me, she was only a heartbeat away.”

As I started interviewing Mrs. King in the mid-1970’s, it was clear that she did not see herself as an appendage or a footnote in history. She often emphasized that she was more than a wife during Dr. King’s life and more than a widow after his death. She once told me “My story is a freedom song of struggle. It is about finding one’s purpose, how to overcome fear and to stand up for causes bigger than one’s self.”

In fact, one of Coretta’s most cherished quotes symbolizes what kind of woman she was. Horace Mann, the founder of Antioch College, her alma mater, once said, “If you have not found a cause to die for, you have not found a reason to live.”

Those were not mere words to her. Coretta lived at a time when she virtually had to have the faith of a prophet and nerves of steel. During the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, carloads of Ku Klux Klan drove through black housing sections. The Kings received constant threatening calls. On January 30, she was in the house with her infant daughter, Yolanda, when their house was bombed.

“We could have been killed but it was just not our time to die,” she told me.

Despite the terrorism and the pleas of her parents to leave Montgomery, Coretta stayed with Martin until the 369-day boycott successfully ended.

“During the bus boycott I was tested by fire and I came to understand that I was not a breakable crystal figurine,” she said. “If I had been fragile and fearful, this would have been too much a distraction for Martin. Certainly his concern for my safety and that of the children would have prevented him from staying focused on the movement. But he came to understand he could trust me with trouble. In Montgomery, I was tested and found I became stronger in a crisis.”

In 1968, the test turned to heart break. On April 4, Dr. King was gunned down in Memphis while campaigning for the rights of striking garbage workers. During the national upheaval and riots following the assassination, much of the nation was awed by her poise and inner strength as she took her slain husband’s place and led the march.

“What most did not understand then was that I was not only married to the man I loved, but I was also married to the movement that I loved,” she said.

In taped interviews, Mrs. King told me how after her husband’s death her faith gave her the strength to raise her four children and to build a world-class center in Atlanta to continue the non-violent work of Dr. King. This move brought her into a bitter contention with some of Dr. King’s chief aides who had their own agendas for self-promotion and tried unsuccessfully to push Mrs. King out of the way.

In Atlanta, she led an effort to redevelop deteriorated neighborhoods that helped create the diversity that attracted the 1996 Summer Olympics. The Center, King’s birth home and his gravesite--where both Kings are entombed--draws thousands of tourists each year and has helped Atlanta become the spiritual Mecca of America, according to Steve Klein, communications director of the Center.

After successfully raising funds for the center, Mrs. King started lobbying for the King Holiday Bill. Only a sentence or a phrase is ever used to describe this effort that took more than 15 years of years of hard-core organizing. It took 6 million signatures, intense lobbying from state to state and organizing by civil rights supporters in Congress and in the streets to pass the legislation to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. It was signed into law on Nov. 2, 1983.

As she worked to institutionalize her husband’s legacy, Mrs. King emerged as an incomparable human rights spokesmen in her own right. “Where ever there was injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion,” she said.

Coretta King and Martin Luther King were two souls with one goal of giving their lives to create a Beloved Community where all people would have dignity and justice. Telling one story without the other creates a flaw and imbalance, a scar on history. It would be shameful for this not to be corrected.

Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds, the author of six books, including “Jesse Jackson: America’s David,” is working on a biography of Coretta Scott King. An ordained minister, she is a former columnist and editorial board member of USA Today.

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President Obama to dedicate new MLK Memorial in DC

By BRETT ZONGKER - Associated Press
AP – Sun, Oct 16, 2011


WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of people have gathered at dawn to give the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial a proper dedication after its opening in August.

Some started lining up at 5 a.m. or earlier Sunday morning. Aretha Franklin, poet Nikki Giovanni and President Barack Obama will be among those honoring the legacy of the nation's foremost civil rights leader.

Organizers anticipate as many as 50,000 people will attend. An earlier ceremony planned for August had to be postponed because of Hurricane Irene. More than 250,000 were expected for that event.

King's sister and two of his children are scheduled to speak. The choir from King's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta will sing.

Giovanni will read her poem "In the Spirit of Martin," and Franklin will sing.

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Martin Luther King Jr. Day would-be bomber pleads guilty

Global Post
Sept. 7 2011


A man with ties to white supremacists plead guilty on Wednesday to charges that he planted a homemade bomb along a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade route in Spokane, Washington earlier this year.

Kevin Harpham, 37, admitted to building a pipe bomb designed to be set off by a remote car-alarm trigger, and leaving the bomb in a backpack along the parade route, The Los Angeles Times reports.

"The placement of an explosive device in a crowded public area is horrific at any time, but this attack, planned to occur during an event celebrating the bonds of our community, makes it all the more reprehensible," Laura Laughlin, special agent in charge of the FBI's Seattle office, said in a statement after Harpham's plea.

According to the Associated Press, Harpham's deal with prosecutors calls for a recommended sentencing range of 27 to 32 years in prison.

The judge at today's hearing asked Harpham if he had placed the bomb in an attempt to hurt people because of their race, color or national origin.

"Yes," Harpham said.

The plea deal charged Harpham with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, and the hate crime of placing the bomb in an effort to target minorities. Harpham spoke in a clear voice when he said "guilty" to each of the two counts.

He will be sentenced Nov. 30.

Harpham told the judge it had taken him about a month to build the bomb. It was discovered by parade workers before the event, and disabled by law enforcement.

The detonator was a remote car starter purchased over the Internet. The shrapnel that would have maimed victims was lead fishing weights purchased from Walmart. Harpham's DNA was on the handle of the backpack that held the bomb. After the arrest, officers found deleted photos in a digital camera that included pictures of Harpham at the parade, pictures of young black children gathering for the march and of a Jewish man who was wearing a yarmulke.

Investigators later discovered Harpham had posted many times over a number of years on a white supremacist website called Vanguard News Network.

United States

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A Dream Fulfilled, Martin Luther King Memorial Opens

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: August 22, 2011
The New York Times


WASHINGTON — Now we know: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it leads to a picturesque glade beside the Tidal Basin, with the Washington Monument providing sentry.

Washington residents and others got their first chance to visit the four-acre memorial on Monday, when it opened after more than two decades of planning. After more than two decades of planning, fund-raising and construction, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial — a four-acre tract south of the Mall featuring a granite statue of Dr. King — has officially opened to the public.

The memorial will be formally dedicated on Sunday in a ceremony that is expected to draw perhaps a few hundred thousand people from around the country. But some of its earliest judges came on Monday, as hundreds of city residents and visitors stood in line for their turn to take a look.

“I wanted to be part of this history,” said William Wilson, a retired federal employee. “This is the architecture of progress.”

The dedication, which is to include remarks by President Obama, coincides with the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.

The monument is the first on the Mall and its adjoining memorial parks to honor an African-American, said Harry E. Johnson Sr., the president of the foundation in charge of erecting it. That made it an emotional occasion for many who came to see it.

“This is important as a black American,” said Jerome McNeil, who was there on Monday taking photographs for his grandchildren. “It’s not just a statue, it’s a symbol of what we can do if we put our minds to it.”

In 1996, Congress authorized the memorial’s establishment, and Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity, set up a foundation to accomplish that.

A Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, was selected to create the 30-foot sculpture, and ROMA Design Group, a company in San Francisco, designed the layout, which includes a bookstore, a wall with Dr. King’s quotations and nearly 200 cherry trees. The cost was $120 million, and organizers said they are still trying to raise the last $5 million.

The design gave form to a line from Dr. King’s “Dream” speech — “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” said Mr. Jackson. In the memorial, he noted, Dr. King is seen emerging from the stone of hope. The two towering mounds set slightly behind him, forming a sort of passageway to the statue, are mountains of despair.

Some visitors said they did not like the fact that Dr. King was facing the Jefferson Memorial, not the Lincoln Memorial, but Mr. McNeil said he did not mind.

“The only thing I don’t like is that I have to wait until 11 a.m. to get in,” he said. During a press briefing on Monday, Mr. Johnson chose to emphasize Dr. King’s focus on poverty and justice, steering away from questions about race. It was more a gesture of hope, he said, than a tactic of avoiding an inevitably difficult conversation.

“We hope that in the next 100 years, that won’t be important,” he said, referring to race relations. He sought to emphasize universal themes. “What’s important is that you have food in your belly.”

For Mr. Wilson, race is still very much present, but he did not expect the monument to do much to change that.

“I don’t think this will resolve a lot of things,” he said. But, glancing up toward the statue of Dr. King, he added: “He definitely earned it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 29, 2011 An article on Tuesday about the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington misidentified its designer. It is the ROMA Design Group, a company in San Francisco — not Ed Jackson Jr., the lead architect on the memorial project. (Mr. Jackson led the effort to select a winning design, and later oversaw its construction, but did not design the memorial or its layout.)

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Another Role for Buses in Civil Rights History

BIRMINGHAM JOURNAL
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: March 18, 2011
The New York Times


BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Get people talking about civil rights-era buses and it’s all Rosa Parks all the time.

“I don't think they intentionally left him out of the history books, but because he operated so under the radar they didn't know what he did," said Donald Crawford, on his father and his bus line.

Museums are dedicated to her role in the boycott in the mid-1950s that forced Montgomery to stop banishing African-Americans to the back of city buses. Schools and stamps bear her name. There is a Rosa Parks cookie jar and a Rosa Parks app.

But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.

His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.

With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.

Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.

So did people heading to dozens of civil rights rallies — including the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech — during a time when chartering a bus from a white-owned company was impossible and driving past the city limits was dangerous for a busload full of African-Americans.

Now, Mr. Crawford’s only remaining child is trying to keep his father’s much more humble dream alive.

“Dad felt he was never really given any recognition,” said Donald Crawford, 62, a longtime Birmingham high school band instructor and jazz musician. “I don’t think they intentionally left him out of the history books, but because he operated so under the radar they didn’t know what he did.”

To try to make things right, his son sat Mr. Crawford down a few years ago and recorded his story, turning it into a self-published book. He titled it “The Wheels of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement,” which is what a pastor called Mr. Crawford at an appreciation the community held for him in 1999.

It is sold at a local black-owned bookstore (though the digitally inclined can find it on Amazon.com) or from the trunk of Donald Crawford’s car. He thought about sending a copy to Oprah Winfrey, but his cousin in Chicago said she thought it was unlikely to reach her.

Copies made their way to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where curators store Mr. Crawford’s oral history.

That is about where formal interest in Mr. Crawford ends. But like people who ran the grocery stores and doctors’ offices and other essential businesses in the era when blacks were not allowed to mix with whites, Mr. Crawford was an essential part of daily life for black Birmingham.

“This is the only bus company that we had in the days of the segregationist era,” said Horace Huntley, who recently retired as a professor of African-American history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and was a board member at the institute.

“Knowing the width and depth of segregation, this is something that was very, very necessary if black people were to move from point A to point B in any semblance of numbers,” Dr. Huntley said. “The importance of it goes without saying.”

Mr. Crawford’s first job in the transportation business was taking the popular Ensley All-Stars black baseball team to games around the South in a truck he used to haul coal. He traded the truck for a bus in 1951.

“As far as I knew I was the only black person that had a bus,” he told his son.

That he could start a bus line occurred to him when his mother-in-law asked him to take her and her church friends to a Seventh-day Adventist convention.

He added another bus and started transporting other church and school groups, sometimes free. But when he went to the county clerk’s office for a commercial license, city officials used a racial slur and laughed him out of the office.

Mr. Crawford figured out that if he “sold” his buses to churches in name only, he could get a special permit and operate a commercial line in a kind of legal gray area. It was cheaper, and he did not have to pay taxes.

“This was the one time racism really worked in my favor,” he said in the book.

His bus line grew, and Jim Crow laws faded. Mr. Crawford’s drivers started taking weekend partiers to New Orleans, Panama City, Fla., and other cities. Eventually, the company was cited for improper permits and other violations.

In 1979, after a series of legal hearings and protests from established interstate bus companies, he got his interstate commercial permit, according to interviews he gave.

“Didn’t nobody know who I was,” Worcy Crawford told The Birmingham News in an interview a few years before he died. “And to this day some people still don’t know who I am. I say that’s the way the Lord planned it.”

Today, 18 of Mr. Crawford’s buses sit in various states of repair on a grassy lot behind his house. Family members still charter two newer coaches, keeping his legacy alive. The others are being sold for parts or kept for reasons of nostalgia.

One of them, a tan GMC bus built in 1958, is nicknamed the Rosa Parks.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2011, on page A15 of the New York edition.

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