21st Century Freedom Riders…how #WeDaPeeps roll

By Stephanie A. Walker Stradford and Eric Stradford, USMC Retired

LEFT: #INGODWETRUST is today’s Learn-2-Earn lesson for youth. Yesterday, March 12, 2014, Freedom Riders were on the bus to their nation’s capital. photo @YouthUSA. RIGHT: Light of freedom — gone out. Perhaps in a supernatural show of favor, a shroud of darkness descended over the U.S. Capitol dome amid power outages throughout Washington, D.C. Wednesday night. @BuzzFeedStorm

AMWS, March 13, 2013, Washington, DC - Voting Rights advocates, commemorating the 49^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, rose early Monday morning to protest the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling in SHELBY COUNTY, ALABAMA v. HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL, ET AL. Traveling by bus, vans, cars, and wireless internet, a new generation of Freedom Riders laid footprints on state capitols making their way from Montgomery, AL to the nation’s capitol.

SCOTUS ruled 5-4 on June 25, 2013 that Section 4 of The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was unconstitutional, stating, "The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions." The majority opinion partnered Chief Justice John G. Roberts with Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito in a 21^st Century movement against all Americans. The white-sheet-to-black-robe-justice movement incited a counter “Saving OurSelves” (SOS) Movement against injustice, fighting for a range of causes stemming from the right to vote.

On the bus from Selma, a new generation of civil rights advocates tweeted and emailed their way to Capitol Hill demonstrating the use of Internet in lifting up their voices to the 113^th U.S. Congress. The legislative body, dubbed the “do nothing congress,” has received at least one issue around which they might rally COMMUNITY over CHAOS.

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek,” said President Barack Obama.

YouthUSA has been working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to develop its historic evidence-based intervention into modern-day applications for Healing America. “Racism is alive and well,” said SCLC National President Charles Steele, Jr. “And, there’s a mean spirit going around where people are still trying to discriminate and destroy the heritage of African Americans.”

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation and others have signed on with President Obama to fund appropriate programs that help achieve “racial equity.” SCLC has been on the bridge for the last 50 years pleading for parity – equal justice and equal opportunity for all. The President’s “My Brother’s Keeper Initiative” establishes a White House Task Force to help connect means of One Nation Under God with historically unmet needs.

The Selma-based 21^st Century Youth Leaders Movement is sponsored by The National Voting Rights Museum. A partnership with Youth Achievers USA Institute (YouthUSA), a national 501c3 public charity, engages local youth in demonstrating that blind justice can and must be color-blind as well.

Dr. H. Benjamin Williams, a local SCLC chapter president, is spearheading a bottoms-up movement for historic civil rights organizations from Information to Operation. “Our mission is to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” he said. “America’s future begins on Our Street. That means putting our youth first, and banking on their futures because our national security depends on it. Their security demands intentional pro-social economic investment in their futures.

Needs of The One

“At times the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the millions, and in time the vision of the one, can move millions to the miracle.” -- Unknown

By Stephanie and Eric Stradford



As millions participated in a virtual March On Washington, Economist Yvonne R. Griswold, a national director for Youth Achievers USA Institute and fellow Youth Achiever John H. Bonds III, regional manager for Global Cleaning Services, LLC, engaged a Whole Village in Cobb County, GA to endow One Community Asset, The Joi Butler Fellowship of YouthUSA. Photo by Crystal Smith
 


AMWS, August 26, 2013, Atlanta – In the national demonstration for human rights, participants are most likely pressed toward the movement. The media mindset of the past has been to microwave the message for quick and easy consumption, mass marketing Cliffnote summaries to the millions and the millions who might follow them.

But for the 50^th Anniversary of the March On Washington, a message is getting through despite some bad habits of the past. Veteran leaders like Dr. C.T. Vivian and The Honorable John Lewis are tapping into endless possibilities for framing collective action by committing themselves to a common vision for America’s Future.

The Reverend Dr. Bernice A. King, Chief Executive Officer for The King Center offered some tangible guidance for moving the movement. In 1963, millions walked away with a common and sustainable reference to the March On Washington. Almost everybody looks back to part of a speech they remember as “I Have A Dream.”

In looking ahead, Bernice A. King is building on a message behind the media blitz of mass movement. The youngest daughter of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King has taken on the task of servant leadership for the remnant watershed factions of the historic American Civil Rights Movement. Her needs, perhaps inspired by the greatest quote from the 1963 #MarchOnWashington, are today among the most important reasons for the masses to march. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” said The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As the youngest of three surviving offspring, her message has been simple, elegant and compelling. But, like her father and her mother before her, the message is still being met with unjustifiable resistance. The media can share blame with the masses because her message to herself has been simply, “BE A KING.” The difference made by half a century of growing up as children of the Civil Rights Movement is that everybody needs to be your daddy and your momma.


Her simple, humble request is for WE THE PEOPLE to follow some marching orders. Buy and read the book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr.  The 50^th Anniversary of the March on Washington holds specifically inspiring significance for B. A. KING. Today, the masses must embrace the humility in the messenger’s enduring message.

Bernice Albertine King (born March 28, 1963) is today an American Baptist minister. She is the second daughter and youngest child of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Her older siblings are Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and the late Yolanda Denise King. Bernice was only five years old when her father died and is the only King child to have become a minister.

Her daddy, Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was, to most of us, an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the history of American progressivism.

A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. He also established his reputation as a radical, and became an object of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO for the rest of his life. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties and reported on them to government officials.

On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam".

King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People's Campaign. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting, and the jury of a 1999 civil trial found Loyd Jowers to be complicit in a conspiracy against King.

King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.

Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?   READ THE BOOK!