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LIVING ACADEMIC eJOURNAL Volume1∙Issue1∙Fall 2018
Online ISSN 2637-9236
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Living Academic eJournal
Forest Of The Rain Productions is proud to announce its newest publication, Living Academic eJournal (LAeJ). Living Academic eJournal will be a “peer-reviewed”/“refereed” journal with a goal of expanding the voices of the seldom head expert in education. Living Academic eJournal will contain articles written by experts in various fields and will be reviewed by our expert reviewers before the article is published in Living Academic eJournal to ensure the article’s quality. The readers of Living Academic eJournal can reasonably expect articles will be scientifically valid, reach reasonable conclusions, close gaps, well researched, and extensively cited. Process for Article Submission: • Please submit abstract of your article to educationalgateway@gmail.com • All abstracts must follow APA 6th Edition formatting • Abstract length: 200 to 300 words max. (Double-spaced) • You will be notified within 72 hours if you are invited to submit an article How to Submit Your Article: • Please submit your article to educationalgateway@gmail.com • All articles must follow APA 6th Edition • Article length: 1200 to 1800 words max. (Double-spaced) • NOTE: Your full name (first and last name) and email address, Twitter name, JPEG photo, and bio
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The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Liberatory and Radical Dream (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) Linda T. Wynn Fisk University/Tennessee Historical Commission
Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that 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. 1 Martin Luther King, Jr.
On April 4, 2018, fifty years after his assassination, the nation paused to remember the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was one of the most (,if not the most) charismatic leaders of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Yet, as the Reverend James Lawson noted, most Americans fail to “type him as a pastor, prophet, theologian, scholar, preacher. . .and that allows conventional minds across the country to thereby stereotype him and eliminate him from an overall analysis of our society.”2 A staunch advocate for those rights denied African Americans and the underprivileged regardless of race, he used the devices of nonviolence and civil disobedience grounded in his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi to bring those rights to fruition. According to Volume 1 of the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951, it was during his matriculation at Atlanta’s Morehouse College that King responded to “an inner urge” summoning him to “serve humanity”. Although he and his followers practiced nonviolence, they confronted violence at every turn, and violence silenced the visionary’s voice. King may be America’s most honored political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names throughout the globe. On the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination, the man who believed and articulated in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”3 is as acknowledged through public awareness as ever. Yet, it must be remembered that while some wanted to “celebrate the whole King─including the man who decried foreign wars and who died for the poor, others preferred to remember just one King: the one frozen on the Washington Mall in August of 1963 who longed for the day his children would ‘not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”’ They molded him into a gentle champion of colorblindness. Americans pick and choose which parts of his career they want to embrace. Many sanitized his message and disinfected his meaning, ultimately replacing the historical King, a courageous dissident who unsettled the powerful, with a mythical King. In his 1957 address at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and Don West, King stated:
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where Do We Go From Here?,” delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967. https://mlkglobal.org/2017/11/23/martin-luther-king-on-capitalism-in-his-own-words/ Accessed, June 29, 2018 2 Michael K. Honey. To the Promise Lane: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018. Pp.11-12. 3 Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter From a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-019.pdf 1
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In “The World House,” Dr. King calls upon the nation to: 1) transcend tribe, race, class, nation, and religion to embrace the vision of a World House; 2) eradicate at home and globally the Triple Evils of racism, poverty, and militarism; 3) curb excessive materialism and shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “people”-oriented society; and 4) resist social injustice and resolve conflicts in the spirit of love embodied in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. He advocates a Marshall Plan to eradicate global poverty, a living wage, and a guaranteed minimum annual income for every American family. He urges the United Nations to experiment with the use of nonviolent direct action in international conflicts. The final paragraph warns of the “fierce urgency of now” and cautions that this may be the last chance to choose between chaos and community.5 In “Racism and the World House,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provided a sophisticated analysis of racism as a global phenomenon, with a focal point on both its devastating impact on people of color and its threat to human welfare and survival. His essential point was that “the world house” at its best could never be supported on a foundation of personal and institutionalized racism.
I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted.4
The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, the younger King’s foundational experiences not only immersed him in the affairs of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, (where his forefathers pastored), but also familiarized him with the African-American social gospel tradition embodied by his father and grandfather, both of whom were affiliated with the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Depression-era breadlines heightened King’s awareness of economic inequities, and his father’s leadership of campaigns against racial discrimination in voting and teachers’ salaries provided a model for the younger King’s own politically engaged ministry. During his undergraduate years (1944-1948) at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, King gradually overcame his initial reluctance to accept his inherited calling. By the end of his third year at Morehouse King entered the ministry. Influenced by his father, Morehouse President Benjamin E. Mays, and George Kelsey, a professor of Religion, he described his decision as a response to an “inner urge” calling him to “serve humanity”. By the time of his senior year, he was already traversing the path of political activism. Responding to the post World War II rise of anti-black violent behavior, King averred in a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution that African Americans were “entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens”.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “A Look to the Future” September 2, 1957 Highlander Folk School http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/look-future. Accessed April 17, 2018. 5 Martin Luther King. Jr. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? http://www.thekinglegacy.org/books/where-do-wego-here-chaos-or-community Accessed April 17, 2018 4
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On June 5, 1955, King received the Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston University. Although Dr. King considered a career in academia, in 1954 he changed his mind and accepted the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. This change ultimately set his life’s journey on the concourse of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King entered the Modern Civil Rights Movement in September of 1954, four months after the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous enunciation in the Brown vs. Board Education decision, when he became involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A boycott that lasted 381 days. After the United States Supreme Court outlawed Alabama’s bus segregation laws in the 1956 Browder v. Gayle Supreme Court case,6 King, C. K. Steele, Fred Shuttlesworth and T.J. Jemison established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president, King coordinated the freedom struggle for civil rights throughout the South. The young minister’s 1958 publication of Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story aided in catapulting King to the position of a national civil rights leader. Notwithstanding his emergence as a recognizable leader of the burgeoning movement, instead of immediately pursuing racial desegregation campaigns in the South, in a speech entitled “Give us the Ballot” given at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, King underscored the objective of attaining voting rights for African Americans when he spoke before an audience at the May 17, 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. Two months earlier King traveled to Ghana as he began to recognize the linkage between racial segregation and colonialism, especially on the continent of Africa. He served as vice chairman of an International Sponsoring Committee for a day of protest in apartheid South Africa. King further articulated the connections between the AfricanAmerican freedom struggle and those abroad when he stated in a sermon entitled, The Birth of a New Nation: Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first, that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it. … Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance. … So, don’t go out this morning with any illusions. … If we wait for it to work itself out, it will never be worked out! Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil…Ghana reminds us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice.7 His connections with a range of international activists, as well as his experiences in Africa, underscored his conviction that movements in different countries were all part of what he called the “worldwide revolution for freedom and justice.”
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Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith served as plaintiffs in the legal action challenging Montgomery's segregated public transportation system. 7 On April 7, 1957, King delivered a sermon to his congregation at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Entitled “The Birth of a New Nation,” the sermon underlined King’s belief in the significance of what he’d seen in Ghana. https://www.theafricacenter.org/martin-luther-king-in-ghana-emotion-connection-and-freedom/ Accessed April 17, 2018.
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From 1955 to 1968, a mere 13 years, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked assiduously to bring the nation in line with its stated values as incorporated in its governing documents of the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to the Sitin Movement, to the movement for voting rights, to bringing economic justice to the Memphis sanitation workers who simply wanted to be treated as Men and given equal wages, King’s ethos and the dogma embedded in country’s prevailing documents were applicable, if not adhered to by those in power. Prior to coming to Memphis, in December 1967 King announced the Poor People’s Campaign, a crusade designed to urge the United States government to improve its antipoverty efforts. This effort was in its early stages when the Reverend James Lawson asked King to come to Memphis, Tennessee, on behalf of the Memphis sanitation workers, who were staging a strike against unfair treatment and wages. A malfunctioning garbage truck crushed Echol Cole and Robert Walker to death on February 1, 1968. After city functionaries failed to respond to their concerns, twelve days later, more than a thousand African American men from the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike. On March 28, 1968 King led thousands of sanitation workers and sympathizers on a march through downtown Memphis. However, mayhem broke out, which led the press to criticize King’s antipoverty strategy. Sixteen- year-old Larry Payne, killed by a shotgun blast fired by patrolmen as he emerged from a basement in a housing development, was the only victim of the violence that followed King’s sanitation workers’ march. He returned to Memphis for the last time in early April. Addressing an audience at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ on the third of April, King seemed hopeful in the face of the “difficult days” that lay ahead. He asserted “But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop [and] I’ve seen the Promised Land.” Continuing in the cadence of a Baptist preacher, he prophesied, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” The following evening while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, at 6:01p.m. convicted assassin James Earl Ray’s single bullet forever silenced the voice of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the humanity’s most powerful voices for human rights and social justice. Four days after King’s assassination, an estimated 42,000 people led by Coretta Scott King, SCLC, and union leaders silently marched through Memphis in honor of King and demanded that Mayor Henry Loeb III give in to the union’s requests. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) pledged support for the workers until “we have justice”. In 1968, King was not dreaming of an America that would judge the worthiness of its people based on their individual character, regardless of their skin color; rather, he was dreaming of one that would judge all its people as being worthy of guaranteed health care, housing, employment, and/or an unconditional, living income, regardless of their character. And King understood that the realization of the former ambition in no way guaranteed the subsequent triumph of the latter one. “We must see that the struggle today is much more difficult,” King said in “The Other America,” the sermon he spent much of the last two years of his life preaching. “It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality,
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integrated education a reality.”8 The core convictions that informed King’s work in the final years of his life — that civil “equality” would have little substance for much of America’s black population absent radical changes to nation’s political economy, and that such changes would be impossible to bring about, absent the mass mobilization of a cross-racial coalition of the economically disadvantaged — ring as true today as they did five decades ago. When one considers the memorial to Dr. King on the National Mall in Washington, D. C., where he is illustrated emerging from a massive “stone of hope” that evokes one of the lines from his I Have A Dream speech,9 the sculpture, which is flanked by a granite wall with fourteen quotes inscribed thereon, as Jeanne Theoharis notes in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, not one quote is chiseled with the words “racism” or segregation, or racial inequality. His description of the experience of racism from “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” is missing. His closing words from the first night of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, hailing a “race of people, a black people. . . who had the moral courage to stand up for their right. . .inject[ing] a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization are missing. His indictment of America in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as “defaulting on this promissory note . . .[having] given the Negro people a bad check” is missing. A man who risked his life and went to jail 30 times to challenge the scourge of American racism; he was quick to point of the racism of the North along with that of the South; who wrote from jail in 1963 that the biggest problem was not the KKK but the “white moderate” who preferred order over justice; who criticized the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism. That man of God and courage is now honored with a memorial that refuses to speak to the problem of racism.10 “I am nevertheless greatly saddened “King said, “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.”11 Dr. King remained unwavering in his steadfastness to fundamentally revolutionize and reconstruct the American social order through nonviolent direct activism until his demise. “To put it in philosophical language, King said, that “racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, would come to conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions.” “Racism”, he further iterated, “is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior.”12 In his 1969 posthumously published essay, “A Testament of Hope”, King asserted that “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society”. The “black révolution” was more than a civil rights movement, he
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THE OTHER AMERICA. A Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 14 April 1967 Stanford University. https://auroraforum.stanford.edu/files/transcripts/Aurora_Forum_Transcript_Martin_Luther_King_The_Other_America_Spe ech_at_Stanford_04.15.07.pdf 9 Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” in a Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., Edited by James M. Washington. New York: Harper Collins, 1986. P. 219. One of the lines in the speech is “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” 10 Jeanne Theoharis. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.Pp. 9-10. 11 King, “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. 12 King, "The Other America" Grosse Pointe High School - March 14, 1968. http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/ Accessed, April 17, 2018.
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insisted. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws─ racism, poverty, militarism and materialism”. 13 The repetitive playing of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has deconstructed his vision of a just society based on “a radical redistribution of economic and political power” and made it difficult to discern that as early as the 1950s, Dr. King called for world disarmament, a dismantling of South Africa apartheid, a global war on poverty, and a means to assist African-Americans surmount historic structural and systemic racism. Like the civil rights organizations of the 1930s, the drum major for justice pursued a twofold agenda of civil rights and economic justice. He was radical throughout his career, which in many instances has been deleted from the historical public narrative. As historian C. Vann Woodward observed in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, “The twilight zone that lies between memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.” Public memory has cherry-picked King’s legacy by turning his forceful battle against systematic racialism into a colorblindness pursuit. Actually, the best way to obliterate the drum major’s prophetic voice is through misuse and deceit. Although King is seen as a dreamer by most, they fail to realize that his dreams were informed by the suffering, despair, failure and even the death of those he served. His political and spiritual values informed his convictions that to achieve justice individuals and societies must grow in radical and revolutionary ways. 14 On February 4, 1968, exactly two months before an assassin’s bullet forever silenced his voice, King delivered his “Drum Major Instinct” sermon at his home church in Atlanta, Georgia. The misuse of this sermon was on full display during the 2018 Super Bowl, when Ram Trucks appropriated some of King’s words for use in an ad that extol the qualities of serving and having the courage to do what is right. The commercial showed scenes of people helping others while Dr. King extolled the virtues of service. At the end, the phrase “Built to Serve” was shown on the screen, along with the Ram logo.15 However, when one reads the “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, Dr. King criticizes car ads and narrates how they exploit a “repressed ego.” He further stated, “Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying.” Not only did he address the “repressed ego,” he continued by noting how poor whites failed to see that the same forces that oppressed African Americans in American society oppress poor white people and how all they are living on is the satisfaction of their skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that they are somebody because of their [privileged] white skin. He also continues his criticism of the Viet Nam War and America’s militarism. Near the end of the sermon, Dr. King imagined the eulogy and the virtues for which he wanted to be remembered for at his funeral: I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. 13
Martin Luther King, Jr.; James Melvin Washington. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francesco: Harper Collins, 1991. 14 Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry. To Shape A New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr .Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. P.9. 15 Sapna Maheshwari, “Ram Trucks Commercial With Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon Is Criticized”, New York Times, February 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/business/media/mlk-commercial-ram-dodge.html Accessed ,June 29, 2018.
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And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.16 As articulated by the noted historiographer Dr. John Hope Franklin, the celebration of the modern movement for African American freedom and justice and one of its most recognizable leaders became a way to eschew recognition of the “enormous gap between America’s practices and its professions.”17 The diminution of King’s philosophy manifests an idealistic, consensus narrative that makes the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s fundamentally conservative —an endeavor not a far-reaching restructuring but one that adhered to the principles put forth by America’s founding fathers. Just ten years after the United States Supreme Court enunciated its 1954 unanimous decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, the United States Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Clay Risen described as the Bill of the Century, notwithstanding the assemblage of formidable senators, who pledged steadfastly to "fight to the death" for segregation and carried out one of the longest filibusters in American history to defeat the act. The following year the Congress passed the Voting Rights of 1965. Three years later on April 11, 1968, just seven days after the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act. The same year that Johnson signed the Housing Act into law, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, delivered a report to the Johnson examining the causes of civil unrest in African American communities. The report identified “white racism”—as the culprit that lead to “pervasive discrimination in employment, education and housing”. In 2018 the Economic Policy Institute issued a report entitled 50 Years after the Kerner Report. The authors of the report found both good news and bad news. The report stated that while African Americans in many ways are better off in absolute terms than they were in 1968, they are still disadvantaged in important ways relative to whites. In several important ways, African Americans actually lost ground relative to whites, and, in a few cases, even relative to African Americans in 1968.18 Some of the report’s key findings are: African Americans today are much better educated than they were in 1968 but still lag behind whites in overall educational attainment. More than 90 percent of younger African Americans (ages 25 to 29) have graduated from high school, compared with just over half in 1968—which means they’ve nearly
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Martin Luther King, Jr. The Drum Major Instinct," Sermon Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, February 4, 1968. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/drum-major-instinct-sermon-delivered-ebenezerbaptist-church Accessed, June 29, 2018. 17 James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History, eds. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, P. 37 18 Janelle Jones, John Schmitt, and Valerie Wilson. 50 years after the Kerner Commission. February 28, 2018. https://www.epi.org/publication/50-years-after-the-kerner-commission/ Accessed, July 16, 2018
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closed the gap with white high school graduation rates. They are also more than twice as likely to have a college degree as in 1968 but are still half as likely as young whites to have a college degree. The substantial progress in educational attainment of African Americans has been accompanied by significant absolute improvements in wages, incomes, wealth, and health since 1968. But black workers still make only 82.5 cents on every dollar earned by white workers, African Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be in poverty as whites, and the median white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family. With respect to homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration, America has failed to deliver any progress for African Americans over the last five decades. In these areas, their situation has either failed to improve relative to whites or has worsened. In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate. In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period. And the share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.19 In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council wanted to confront inequality with the Economic Bill of Rights that was a moral vision of a just America. An America where all citizens had educational opportunities, a home, “access to land,” “a meaningful job at a living wage” and “a secure and adequate income.” Those ideas were revolutionary in 1968. Today, they appear prophetic. King’s belief that all citizens need a living wage presages the universal basic income concept now gaining traction worldwide. Although African Americans have not totally made it to the “promise land,” in many areas they have made some progress since 1968. 20 The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered as one of America’s greatest orators. An envoi for nonviolence, he became one of the most identifiable leaders of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Yet, fifty years after his assassination, many do not recognize that King’s radicalism underscored his revolutionary vision, his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism. As Cornell West notes in The Radical King, "Although much of America did not know the radical King--and too few know today--the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and US government did. They called him 'the most dangerous man in America.'”21 In March 1967 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered a counterintelligence (COINTELPRO) campaign to prevent the rise of a “black messiah,” and redoubled efforts to counteract King. The FBI even sent King an
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Janelle Jones, John Schmitt, and Valerie Wilson. 50 years after the Kerner Commission. February 28, 2018. https://www.epi.org/publication/50-years-after-the-kerner-commission/ Accessed, July 16, 2018 20 Black Americans mostly left behind by progress since Dr. King’s death https: //theconversation.com/black-americans-mostlyleft-behind-by-progress-since-dr-kings-death-89956 Accessed July 18, 2018. 21 Cornel West. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Radical King. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2015. p. x
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anonymous letter urging him to take him own life.22 Today few, if any, will concede that prior to his assassination, the Reverend Dr. King was America’s most reviled public figure. In May 1967, according to a Harris Poll 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of African Americans disapproved of King’s opposition to the war in Vietnam, as well as his efforts to eradicate poverty in America.23 He stood for justice and equality, advocated for the impoverished, and criticized American capitalism and the nation’s involvement in world-wide conflict. Said King on March 30, 1967, “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”24 It can be surmised given the present zeitgeist that over the last 50 years America has not dealt with the issues about which King so adamantly addressed throughout his work on the battlefield of civil and human rights. However, while America as a whole may not be addressing these issues that impact its populace, regardless of color, there are groups that have focused a laser beam on some of the concerns that King sought to remedy. Groups like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too Movement and the Parkland Students are all in their own way continuing the effort to save the soul of America. Notwithstanding, today King’s vision for an equitable American society manifested by a yearning for racial, social, and economic justice, remains as germane as ever. For What’s Past is Prologue.
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Honey. To the Promise Land. P. 2 Harris Poll, May 22, 1967 24 Thomas Borestelmann. The Cold War and the Color Line. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2009. P. 209 23
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Author’s Bio
Linda T. Wynn earned her B.S. and M. S. degrees in history and a Masters in Public Administration from Tennessee State University. Appointed by Mayor Karl Dean and confirmed by the Metropolitan Council, she serves on the Metropolitan Historical Commission and is a member of its Markers Committee, as well as its Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee. Mrs. Wynn is the editor of Journey to Our Past: A Guide to African-American Markers in Tennessee. A contributor to the African American National Biography published by Oxford University Press, she prepared several biographies and served as a consultant for the Encyclopedia of African American Business and Notable Black American Men, Book II, edited by Dr. Jessie C. Smith. The author of the African American Almanac’s chapter on “Civil Rights,” she is also a contributor to Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Sarah L. Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly G. Bond and published by the University of Georgia Press. A book review contributor to the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, she has a pioneering chapter on The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the meaning of his ethos for women across the globe entitled “Beyond Patriarchy: The Meaning of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Women of the World” in Caught in an Inescapable Network of Mutuality edited by noted King scholar Lewis V. Baldwin and Paul Dekar. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
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Meet the Living Education eJoural Reviewers
four-year college founded in 1926 and located in Bennington, VT. The College offers a career-launching education with a liberal arts core. The College enrolls many first generation, low-income students and is dedicated to vulnerable student success. From Jan. 2012 – 2013, Karen Gross served as Senior Policy Advisor to the US Department of Education in Washington, DC. In that capacity, I was the Department's representative on the interagency task force charged with redesigning the transition assistance program for returning service members and their families, working closely with the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Labor.
Donna Y. Ford, PhD., is Professor of Education and Human Development and Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair at Vanderbilt University. She is the former 2013 Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor and former Betts Chair of Education & Human Development. Dr. Ford currently holds a joint appointment in the Department of Special Education and Department of Teaching and Learning. Dr. Ford has been a Professor of Special Education at the Ohio State University, an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Virginia, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. Professor Ford earned her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Urban Education (educational psychology) (1991), Masters of Education degree (counseling) (1988), and Bachelor of Arts degree in communications and Spanish (1984) from Cleveland State University. Professor Ford conducts research primarily in gifted education and multicultural/urban education. Specifically, her work focuses on: (1) the achievement gap; (2) recruiting and retaining culturally different students in gifted education; (3) multicultural curriculum and instruction; (4) culturally competent teacher training and development; (5) African-American identity; and (6) African-American family involvement. She consults with school districts, and educational and legal organizations on such topics as gifted education under-representation and Advanced Placement, multicultural/urban education and counseling, and closing the achievement gap. Karen Gross, Esq. served for 8 plus years, as President of Southern Vermont College, a small, private, affordable,
Shanelle R. Benson Reid, Ph.D. President, and CEO of ACCESS Global Enterprises, LLC. is a Scholar, Consultant, Coach, Author and Professional Speaker. Her expertise is in Education, Cultural Competency, Social Awareness, and Community Empowerment. AG Enterprises is a family of companies. AGE Coaching and Consulting offers coaching, consulting and professional programs. AGE Media Group produces Ed Talk; our podcast, publications and social media components and creates our virtual learning community. Our Tech Company is Tech Novice, we offer training and support for individuals with limited or no technical experience. AGE Publishing House is a small press publisher that shares the voices of the seldom heard. Get to know us. We would love to hear from you. Dr. Benson Reid earned a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a Master's in Education (Special Education Option) from CSUSB as well. Dr. Benson Reid earned her Doctorate from the University of La Verne in Organizational Leadership. Her dissertation is titled "A Case Study of the Historically, Successful Roles of African American Teachers, in Contemporary, Selected, Urban Charter School in New York." Tom Granoff, Ph.D. as a statistical / methodology consultant has helped 1000s of behavioral science students become doctors sooner since 1980. Dr. Granoff has over 35 years of experiences providing research methodology, data analysis, and productivity coaching in academic, corporate, and governmental settings using SPSS. Since 2001, he’s worked on numerous (150+) scholarly projects each year. Dr. Granoff assists students in obtaining advanced degrees in leadership, psychology, education, management, public health, marketing, nursing, etc. Tom also has taught online and face-to-face graduate-level research methods/statistics courses since 1997 for LMU, Pepperdine University, and CSULB, all in Los Angeles.
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being able to explain most multivariate statistical tests in simple English without using complex mathematical formulas. His formal education includes a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology plus three Master's degrees (Clinical Psychology, Theology, and I/O Psychology). In addition, Tom is a Professional Coaching Certification from the International Coaching Federation. Lyn Walden, Ph.D. has more than 30 years' experience teaching at the university and high school level, Dr. Lyn Walden has helped thousands of individuals through the dissertation process, and she has written several books to help her clients understand the confusing dissertation process. With a background in special education and educational leadership, Dr. Walden firmly believes every doctoral candidate can graduate if he or she has the proper materials. Dr. Walden fully understands the frustrations of doctoral candidates who struggle to meet the exacting requirements of university checklists and rubrics and the conflicting instructions of different chairs, professors, committee members, IRB representatives, and the dean's people. An active member of the Professional Editor's Network, Dr. Walden is a professional dissertation editor who specializes in APA and university-specific manuscript editing. She is also a member of the National Academic Advising Association and holds Six Sigma Generation IV™ certification in coaching. With her 25+ years of dissertation coaching experience, she has helped doctoral candidates from universities from all over the world. She truly understands the frustrating requirements of numerous institutions and guides numerous students a year through institutional reviews and required approvals. A published author, Dr. Walden holds a bachelor, a master's, a specialist, and two terminal degrees in
education and a bachelor and a master's degree in psychology plus additional certification in history, humanities, writing, and life coaching. She is a retired public school teacher and adjunct professor. She is a member of numerous professional organizations and honor societies, and she is also the proud grandmother of two teenage granddaughters. Dr. Walden lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Douglas Thomas, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor. Dr. Thomas is a native of Southwest Arkansas and North Louisiana. He received his Ph.D. in History from Georgia State University in 2010. In 2001, Dr. Thomas earned his MA in History from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. In 1997, He earned his BA in History from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas. Dr. Thomas’s specialty is in Religious History of West Africa. Before coming to Brockport, Dr. Thomas taught in West Africa (Cuttington University in Liberia and Université Kofi Annan de Guinée in Guinea-Conakry) and at the world-famed Grambling State University (the place where everybody is somebody) where he taught African History. Dr. Thomas’s main place of research is Senegal where he visits regularly. Moving to Western New York in 2018, he has found a place in Brockport’s African and AfricanAmerican Studies Department. Dr. Thomas’s first book was Sufism, Mahdism, and Nationalism: Limamou Laye and the Layennes of Senegal (2012). Dr. Thomas, along with Temilola Alanamu, coedited a reference work entitled African Religions: Belief and Practice through History (2018). Currently Dr. Thomas is working on a manuscript detailing the West African dual-gender authority system practiced in an African-American Church. Dr. Thomas is also working on a biography of Latsukaabe Ngoné Fall, early 18th Century dameel (king) of Kajoor.
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Dede Rittman, the author of GRADY GETS GLASSES, got glasses when she was just 4 years old. Her first glasses were pink, and Dede never forgot the how those pretty pink glasses changed her view of the world from a large blur of fuzziness to a beautiful world of crisp colors and shapes. Dede was a high school English and Theater teacher for 37 years. She loved school, and would have taught for 40 years, but her beloved husband, Scott, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, so Dede retired in June of 2011 to care for him. Sadly, Scott died in May of 2012. Because Dede missed the classroom and helping students, she decided to write and publish her first book, STUDENT TEACHING: THE INSIDE SCOOP FROM A MASTER TEACHER. (www.dederittman.com ) Since the book’s debut in September of 2014, Dede has been enjoying numerous speaking engagements at colleges and universities, and presenting online webinars for educators, interviewing on various radio shows, and even co-hosting a radio show for education. Christopher Wooleyhand, Ph.D. is an elementary principal in Glen Burnie, Maryland with 28 years of experience in education. He is an adjunct lecturer at McDaniel College focused on the connection between teacher leadership and school performance. Dr. Wooleyhand’s blog, Common Sense School Leadership, highlights the need for practical solutions to the challenges of modern school reform. A former Peace Corps volunteer in the West Indies, Wooleyhand writes about the achievement gap and the need for equitable practices in education. He has been published in Educational Leadership and Principal magazine. Dr. Wooleyhand has served as a prospectus reviewer for Corwin Press and Solution Tree Press. He is currently an editorial advisor for Principal magazine. He is also co-founder and co-moderator of Maryland Elementary School Chat (#mdeschat) which meets every Thursday evening at 8:00 p.m. on Twitter. He can be followed on Twitter @principal64. Cristina Rodriguez Chen, Ph.D. is a highly credentialed, bilingual (Spanish speaking) professional educator, with over 22 years of experience in the areas of Bilingual/ESL, General Education, Gifted and Talented, and Special Education. Dr. Chen received her Ph.D. from the University of North Texas. Her area of concentration is
Mild/Moderate Disabilities. Her dissertation topic focused on culturally competent evaluations for special education. She has served as a special education coordinator for the past 12 years. Ms. Chen has presented at state and national conferences on varied topics related to students with disabilities and cultural diversity. She holds certifications in the following areas: Administrative Certification: Principal, Special Education K-12, Classroom Teacher Generalist EC-4, Classroom Bilingual Generalist EC-4, Classroom Educational Diagnostician PK-12, Generic Special Education PK12, and 30 Hour Training for Gifted and Talented. She is certified as a Texas Registered Professional Educational Diagnostician and Nationally Certified Educational Diagnostician. She received the Outstanding Graduate Student in Educational Psychology at UNT in April 2015. Gwenetta Curry, Ph.D.is an assistant professor in the Gender and Race Studies Department. She completed her Ph.D. in 2016 from Texas A&M University in Sociology. Her dissertation, “The Relationship between Education and Obesity among Black Women in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Cycles 1999-2010,” revealed that education does not improve the health of Black women in the same manner as their white counterparts. Her current research focus on improving the health of Black women and the Black family overall. Dr. Curry’s research areas include: Health Disparities, Africana Womanism, Black Family Studies, Food Insecurities, Food culture, and American Racism. Devin DeLaughter, Ph.D. holds a Bachelor of Science Degree with a major in mathematics from Sewanee; an MEd in Educational Leadership from Covenant College; and an EdD in Educational Leadership from Dallas Baptist University. Dr. DeLaughter will be teaching Algebra I and Algebra I Honors, as well as working with our track and field program this year. In the past, he has taught PreAlgebra, Algebra I and II, Geometry, Pre-AP Algebra II, Geometry, and Cultural Studies. Dr. DeLaughter has served as a Director of Athletics, Director of Multicultural Affairs, and Assistant Principal. Dr. DeLaughter brings many years of experience in high school classrooms at various different levels. We are happy to have a teacher with his expertise in the Father Ryan community.
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Process for Article Submission: • Please submit abstract of your article to educationalgateway@gmail.com • All abstracts must follow APA 6th Edition formatting • Abstract length: 200 to 300 words max. (Double-spaced) • You will be notified within 72 hours if you are invited to submit an article How to Submit Your Article: • Please submit your article to educationalgateway@gmail.com • All articles must follow APA 6th Edition • Article length: 1200 to 1800 words max. (Double-spaced) • NOTE: Your full name (first and last name) and email address, Twitter name, JPEG photo, and bio Tips for Submission: • Cited work. Well researched • An Abstract (brief description of the article) • Organize the article into discrete sections such as Methodology, Results, and Conclusion • Charts, tables, or graphs are welcome • Complex, formal language that is specific to the field of your article