Why MLK Wore a Lei at Selma

In 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King led the iconic Alabama march from Selma to Montgomery. It was a watershed moment in the battle for racial equality. What people don’t always notice is that Dr. King and many of his fellow marchers wore Hawaiian lei.

It began with a meeting between Dr. King and the Reverend Abraham Akaka (older brother of future U.S. Sen. Dan Akaka). The pair hit it off, and the garlands were delivered just prior to the march. Dr. King apparently saw them as a symbol of strength and fragility, and felt an inherent connection between the struggle for racial justice and the battle Native Hawaiians were waging for acknowledgment and equal treatment.

In 1959, Dr. King sang Hawai‘i’s praises in a speech to the state legislature:

“I come to you with a great deal of appreciation and great feeling of appreciation, I should say, for what has been accomplished in this beautiful setting and in this beautiful state of our Union. As I think of the struggle that we are engaged in in the South land, we look to you for inspiration and as a noble example, where you have already accomplished in the area of racial harmony and racial justice, what we are struggling to accomplish in other sections of the country, and you can never know what it means to those of us caught for the moment in the tragic and often dark midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, to come to a place where we see the glowing daybreak of freedom and dignity and racial justice.”

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Worldwide, green sea turtle populations are endangered. Their numbers have dropped by 90 percent from historical levels. In the Hawaiian islands, the Endangered Species Act put our sea turtles (honu) on a path to recovery, and the green sea turtle population that lives here is considered of least concern, rather than endangered or threatened.

While the story of honu in Hawai‘i is one on a trajectory to success based on the numbers, this does not mean that our turtles have it easy. For a turtle to reach adulthood, which takes anywhere from 20-30 years, it must avoid predators, disease, and other natural hazards, just for a start. The odds of a turtle surviving to that age are about 1,000 to one.

Let’s consider some of the challenges sea turtles face on their path to becoming a grown-up.

Nests and hatchlings are vulnerable to a range of dangers. Storms can flood nests or simply wash them away. People driving on beaches can crush nests or harden the sand to the point where the hatchlings can’t dig out. Predators above and below the water consider the flippered little