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The San Diego Monitor
The Young Man Who Became a Civil-Rights Icon Before he led the Montgomery bus boycott or marched on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. was a chain-smoking, poolplaying student at Crozer Theological College just discovering his passion for social justice.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. became a great man, he was a young man, and he often acted like one. In The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, to be published this spring, Patrick Parr focuses on the future icon’s three years at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, from 1948 to 1951. Surrounded by white professors and staff and a predominantly white student body, he became the student-body president. But long before King entered the seminary as a 19-year-old college graduate, this son of a leading black preacher in Atlanta had already felt the humiliations of racial segregation.
As a 15-year-old in high school, in 1944, King traveled by public bus with a schoolmate, Hiram Kendall, and their teacher Sarah Grace Bradley from Atlanta to Dublin, Georgia, about 140 miles away, to participate in an oratorical contest. His speech, a modulated yet spirited call for equal rights, did not win, but what happened on the trip home shaped the rest of his life. After an hour of driving, the bus stopped in the city of Macon, and a crowd of white passengers started to board. Before this rush, the black passengers were free to sit anywhere, and ML and Hiram had seated themselves toward the front. But as soon as seats became scarce, the white bus driver stared at ML and Hiram and “ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats,” King later recalled. At first, ML and Hiram did nothing, ignoring the escalating tension. “We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us.” With white passengers standing in the aisle, the bus driver demanded ML and Hiram move out of their seats, calling them “niggers” and “black sons of bitches” … Miss Bradley swooped in to resolve the matter. According to ML, “Mrs. Bradley urged me up, saying we had to obey the law.” Anger boiled within as he was pressed to capitulate to the racist system he had just railed against in his speech. “I refused to go to the back of the bus,” but “the teacher pleaded with me. She said it would be advisable.”
King (front row, third from left) enters Morehouse College at age 15, having skipped two years of high school. (Courtesy of Morehouse College)
Eventually, with passengers looking on and the bus ride at a standstill, ML reluctantly gave in. ML, Hiram, and Miss Bradley walked to the back of the bus and grabbed a handle. “I had to stand all the way to Atlanta,” King remembered decades later, his anger still there. As the bus went up the rural highway, ML had nothing to look at but seated white people and the darkness outside. “It was late at night and I was tired, but that wasn’t the point. It was the humiliation.” For ninety miles, ML barely kept his contained anger at bay. “That night will never leave my memory,” he said. “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.” Yes, he’d been angry at Miss Bradley for pushing him to leave his seat, but, far more, he resented the “chains” of America that had shackled him to the back of the bus. “Suddenly I realized you don’t count, you’re nobody.” Embarrassed by the emotionalism—“the shouting and the stomping”—of black religion, the young King considered careers in law and medicine. He enrolled at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, where he wound up majoring in sociology. But his continuing desire to bring social change ultimately led him to enter Crozer, a Protestant seminary near Philadelphia. In September 1944, fifteen-year-old Morehouse freshman Martin Luther King Jr. needed a haircut. He’d heard about a fellow student who cut hair in the basement of the college’s Graves Hall. The barber, named Walter McCall, was a twenty-one-year-old army veteran. ML heard that he was cutting hair for a dime, so he went to him and gave it a try. After one cut, McCall asked for the dime. ML explained that he didn’t have a coin on him but that he’d pay him later. This idea of an IOU system did not sit well with McCall. You and I both know you have a dime, he insisted. “Man. I haven’t got it now,” ML replied. “So there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you want to go to the grass.”
The phrase “go to the grass” was new to McCall, but he knew what it meant: King believed he could take him in a fight. McCall tackled his customer and they wrestled on the floor—a vet fighting a teenager. The pushing and shoving eventually made its way outside onto the lawn, their bout intense enough to attract other students. For those who saw the fight, many expected the older soldier to easily beat up on the smaller, less experienced ML. But for one of the few times in ML’s young life, he fought back, and he earned the vet’s respect. The two young men quickly became friends. “I always called him ‘Mike’ and he called me ‘Mac,’ ” said McCall years later. They bonded despite being opposites in almost every way. ML was cautious and reserved, living comfortably … as the son of a successful preacher. McCall was bolder and louder, and always struggling to make ends meet … In a way, each friend had what the other wanted: Mac envied ML’s financial situation and parental support, while ML longed for Mac’s hard-earned life experience and his knack for livening up any social encounter. McCall served as a constant reminder to his friend that there was more to experience than classes and church. During their years at Morehouse, they held secret dance parties at ML’s home while Daddy and Mama King were out. “One night I remember so well—boy, we had a good time going,” said McCall. “The old man [Daddy King] … stood at the door to listen to the music and he peeped through the keyhole and we didn’t know it. All of a sudden he burst into the house and there we were just swinging away into the night” …
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The San Diego Monitor
What do they Want you to KNOW? What Everyone Needs to Know About 2020 Census Questions
By law, the U.S. government is required to count the number of people living in the United States every 10 years. Getting an accurate count is important because census numbers impact daily life in the United States in many ways. For example, census data are often used to determine how much federal funding is allocated for important projects and services that benefit local communities. The census also plays a vital role in our nation’s system of government by determining how many representatives will be sent to Congress from each state.
Because getting an accurate count is so important, the process is designed to be fast, easy, and safe. On average, it takes no more than 10 minutes to answer the questions on the census. How Are Census Data Collected? During the first census in 1790, census takers visited nearly every U.S. home to gather data. In 2020, households will have the option of responding online, by mail, or by phone. The Census Bureau expects many households to complete the questionnaire online, using instructions received in the mail. These instructions will also include information about how to respond by phone. Some households will receive a printed questionnaire which they can mail, postage-free, back to the
Be Counted! SDMNEWS’S Motivation Information
Census Bureau. A small percentage of households, primarily located in remote areas of the country, will be visited by a census taker who will help collect the necessary information to complete the form. Who Receives the Census Questionnaire and How Is It Filled Out? Most housing units in the United States that receive mail at their physical location will receive a letter by mail with instructions on how to complete the census questionnaire. Housing units include houses, apartments, cabins, mobile homes—pretty much any place where people live in the United States. In areas where the majority of housing units do not have mail delivered to their physical location, census workers will leave questionnaire packages at every identified housing unit. The census process also includes special provisions to count people who are homeless and those in other types of living quarters, such as college dorms, military barracks, ships, prisons, nursing homes, and homeless shelters. The person in the housing unit who fills out the census questionnaire or talks to the census taker is known as Person 1. Typically, Person 1 is the owner/co-owner or renter/corenter of the housing unit. READ MORE sdmonitornews.com
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The San Diego Monitor
SDMNEWS Must Read 2020 CA Census Guide Table of Contents Section 1: General Information (PDF) •
Initiative and Referendum Qualification Requirements
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Candidate Qualifications and Information
Section 2: Nomination Requirements (PDF) •
Presidential Candidates
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United States Representative in Congress, and Member of the State Legislature Candidates
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Nomination Documents – Nomination Papers and Declaration of Candidacy
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Signatures In Lieu of Filing Fee
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Signatures In Lieu of Filing Fee and/or Nomination Papers
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Ballot Designations
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In General
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Campaign Filings and Responsibilities
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Candidate Intention Statement
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Campaign Contribution Account
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Exceptions
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Additional Filing Information
Section 3: Candidate Filing Information (PDF) •
Required Filing Fees, Nomination Signatures
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Write-In Candidates for the Office of President
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Write-In Candidates for Voter-Nominated Offices
In-Lieu
Signatures,
Section 4: Candidate Checklist (PDF) •
President of the United States
•
United States Representative in Congress
For download please go to www.sdmonitornews.com
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The San Diego Monitor
Disrupting Activism
“What does Andrew Young do for black people in Atlanta?” said 18-year-old Aurelia Williams with a shrug, a spokesman for Atlanta Black Lives Matter, standing outside a transit station as protesters gathered for another rally. “A lot of people look to Andrew Young for guidance – or they did. Now he’s just another person we’re fighting in the trenches.” While the protests spurred by fatal shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana follow some traditions of the 1950s and ‘60s, there are distinct differences. Both share a goal of racial justice and equality, yet the newer generation is more raw and spontaneous, focusing on personal emotions and therapeutic ideas of healing more than political debate and policy proposals. “Stop telling us to have a plan, goals and a solution for black folks,” Avery Jackson, an Atlanta student organizer, tweeted. “Realize that it is dismissive and disrespectful to ask black people why they are taking the streets, affirming their lives and healing.” For some traditional activists and long-term observers of the civil rights movement, the lack of an agreed-upon game plan can be baffling.
“The fundamental, ongoing problem here is apparently that the vast majority of protesters don’t have any specific agenda that they’re arguing for,” said David J. Garrow, professor of history and law at the University of Pittsburgh and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the civil rights era. Nor, he added, do they seem to know much about civil rights history. For millennials, the police shootings hit hard, said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University. “A lot of those folks were tweens and teenagers when Barack Obama was elected president and everyone proclaimed a post-racial America. And now they’re older and realizing that whole post-racial dream – that race doesn’t matter – was not true. They’re having their reckoning.” At times, there’s a sense the old guard gave up the fight long ago, said Nekima Levy-Pounds, 40, president of the Minneapolis chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of ColoredPeople and a past spokeswoman for Black Lives Matter.
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“After King was assassinated in 1968, the baton was basically dropped on the street,” she said. “For the younger generation, there’s not much we can point to since King’s assassination that’s been accomplished, so those folks are not necessarily in a position to tell young activists what to do.” Some older civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which came into existence in an era when black people were excluded from public office, have struggled to maintain relevance as a wave of African Americans became mayors, police chiefs, city council members, senators and congressmen. As movement leaders took on mainstream political positions, some activists say they became part of the establishment they once fought. For younger protesters, the tactics and ideology of traditional groups fall short. Some are more influenced by the tenets of black pride popularized by Malcolm X and the more militant 1960s and ‘70s groups, such as the Black Panthers. Others draw on more modern ideas of social justice and identity politics, from “intersectionality” to “safe spaces.”
The San Diego Monitor Almost all see Black Lives Matter as correcting the blind spots of those who came before, providing an umbrella for all black people, including the most marginalized – women, the homeless, the LGBT community, sex workers, those with criminal records. Yet division is not strictly along generational lines. During the recent volley of protests, some traditional civil rights groups, from the NAACP to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, have swiftly organized their own demonstrations and meetings and several older figureheads have been quick to defend younger protesters. After Young’s admonishment, NAACP President Francys Johnson suggested that the veteran civil rights warrior should “go quickly and quietly into a well-deserved retirement.” Still, younger Atlanta activists feel a disconnect with the old champions of social justice. After Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, student Aurielle Marie, 21, said she and fellow activists called all the civil rights groups they could think of, including the SCLC, the NAACP and the National Action Network. Continued on pg.9
KING: The Revolutionary The Speech that Actually Changed America The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the most important speech of his life at the Riverside Church in New York, denouncing the Vietnam War and connecting the American civil rights struggle with a larger, global movement for peace and human rights. Forty-nine years ago this week, King was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. King's assertion that the United States was the "world's greatest purveyor of violence" threw down a political gauntlet that would frame the revolutionary path he would follow during the last year of his life. "The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve," King told a packed audience in Riverside's pews.
At first blush it may seem counterintuitive to elevate this speech above the watershed "I Have a Dream" speech delivered four years earlier, or the "Mountaintop" speech he would give on the eve of his death. But if King's address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made him into an American icon, his Riverside Church speech announced him as a genuine prophet for social justice, one who willingly sacrificed his hard-won status to defy an empire. The 50th anniversary of this speech is a profound occasion to counter the selective memory with which America has retrospectively embraced King. As a nation, we -- especially our elected officials and political leaders -- only remember the parts of King that align with what we choose to emphasize: his robust embrace of America's democratic traditions going back to the founders. King's elegant lauding of "those great wells of democracy" in his Letter from Birmingham Jail remains a touchstone in our own time. Yet King grew increasingly bold and courageous as he confronted systemic challenges to his dream of multiracial democracy, what he called a "beloved community." The proliferation of urban violence, rural poverty, institutional racism and war forced him to reconsider the extent that mere political reforms would lead to economic and racial justice for all. In the year between the Riverside speech and his assassination, King became America's most wellknown anti-war activist, assuming the mantle from Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and in the process lending a Nobel Peace Prize winner's moral power to a peace movement struggling amid a political landscape where most still supported the war. King's speech blamed the nation's Cold Warfueled ambitions for the faltering war against poverty, the policy jewel in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. While resources to fund the war drained the nation's financial and moral capital, suffering and discord at home inspired riots that King characterized in another speech as "the language of the unheard." For the first time in the Riverside speech, King connected a domestic civil rights movement with US foreign policy.
He based his criticism of the war on a profound love for America, contrasting the "hopes" and "new beginnings" promised by a national anti-poverty crusade with the escalating death, violence and destruction in Southeast Asia. Many blasted this decision as unwise and irresponsible. His criticism of the Johnson White House ended a once-close professional relationship that found him on the receiving end of presidential pens signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Once praised by mainstream political and civic leaders for his philosophy of nonviolence, King found himself vilified for calling for an end to the bombing of Vietnamese villages and the napalming of innocent children. The Riverside speech's unpopularity -- fueled by its candid assessment of the shortcomings of American democracy -- is precisely what makes it King's most powerful and important speech. King loved America enough to always be honest. A political leader who dined with royalty and met with presidents at the White House found himself increasingly drawn to the plight of poor people around the world. His belief that black sharecroppers in the Deep South deserved the same consideration as intellectual and economic elites led to his championing a Poor Peoples Campaign that planned to descend on the nation's capital in May 1968 until Congress passed legislation that addressed growing inequality in America. After King's assassination that April, his widow and others tried to continue this work. By the time King approached the pulpit at Riverside Church that early spring day in 1967 the gap between America's democratic ideals and its stubbornly unequal reality had, according to King, grown into an unconscionable chasm. There comes a time when "silence is betrayal," said King in words meant to admonish himself as much as the rest of the nation.
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The San Diego Monitor
Grossmont Union Still Expels Black Students Far More Often Than Other Local Schools Grossmont Union High School District is still expelling black students at significantly higher rates than other school districts, new data shows. Grossmont officials have pledged to reduce the district’s overall expulsion rate by 2020, but have so far not acknowledged problems in their expulsion rate for black students. Data released by the California Department of Education show that while the county’s expulsion rates are continuing to drop — likely because of an increased focus on restorative justice practices — Grossmont is nowhere near meeting its goal. For the 2018-19 school year, the district expelled black students at nine times the average expulsion rate for black students countywide. During the three previous school years, Grossmont’s expulsion rate for black students was at least six times the county average.
Grossmont’s expulsion rate for black students actually went down slightly in the 2018-19 school year to 1.46 percent. But it was still far above the county average of .16 percent.
Francine Maxwell, the vice president of the San Diego NAACP branch, called the numbers “historic” and said Grossmont’s staff has long lacked diversity and cultural sensitivity. “There has not been a single year in which we have not seen complaints from that school district,” Maxwell said. “Only after you seek help and you know that you’re doing something wrong is when you want to change your behavior. That is the issue with (Grossmont). They don’t think that they’re doing anything wrong nor do they want to change their behavior because they don’t admit to anything.” Grossmont officials declined to comment.
DISRUPTING ACTIVISM: “We called all the people who we were taught were the leaders,” she said. “Why would we want to reinvent the wheel when people are alive who know how this goes? But we couldn’t get meetings. Word came down to us that right now is not the right time. We needed to wait on the investigation.” And so they forged ahead on their own. The groups that coalesce around Black Lives Matter favor a looser structure, working on the principle that no one person or group of individuals should speak for all. Organizers say their demands are not that complicated: “Stop killing black people,” Williams said. “We’re going to keep marching until you stop killing us.” Williams, who met with Atlanta’s mayor and police chief recently during a sit-in outside the governor’s mansion, declined to list protesters’ demands, saying they were still working on goals before a formal meeting. “It’s, like, a very fluid thing,” she said. “At the end of our day, at our core, we are a group of people who came together who were upset by things we saw. We don’t want to sit here and tie it down... Why isn’t it enough to just stand for black people?”
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