Tag: Martin Luther King

#GuestPost: Martin Luther King Day 2026

Posted on by Galen Charlton | Author : | Guest Posts> Holidays> Martin Luther King Jr. Day
The “Stone of Hope” at the MLK National Memorial

A proclamation by President Obama on 13 January 2017:

Those who dismiss the magnitude of the progress that has been made dishonor the courage of all who marched and struggled to bring about this change — and those who suggest that the great task of extending our Nation’s promise to every individual is somehow complete neglect the sacrifices that made it possible. Dr. King taught us that “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Although we do not face the same challenges that spurred the Civil Rights Movement, the fierce urgency of now — and the need for persistence, determination, and constant vigilance — is still required for us to meet the complex demands and defeat the injustices of our time. With the same iron will and hope in our hearts, it is our duty to secure economic opportunity, access to education, and equal treatment under the law for all. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it only bends because of the strength and sacrifice of those who reject complacency and drive us forward.

…

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 16, 2017, as the Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday. I encourage all Americans to observe this day with appropriate civic, community, and service projects in honor of Dr. King and to visit www.MLKDay.gov to find Martin Luther King, Jr., Day of Service projects across our country.

OK, let’s TRY to visit www.mlkday.gov:

Let’s try it without the “www”. Little better:

As of the drafting of this post, Trump has not deigned to release a proclamation for MLK Day 2026. I, for one, will not be waiting for it: he said enough last year by dropping MLK Day and Juneteenth as free-admittance days for national parks in favor of his own birthday.

If the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice only through the effort of people, it can certainly bend the other way. We are now living in dangerous times for our Republic, with the outcome uncertain.

King himself certainly had no illusions that the Civil Rights Movement, despite its clear victories, was something forever settled with the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964; he was killed while seeking justice for Memphis’ sanitation workers. Had he lived on until a peaceful death at a natural age, there cannot be any doubt that he would have been occupied the entire time remaining to him with that fight for justice.

Today the administration has seen fit to not do so much as dust off a web page listing some volunteer opportunities to mark this day. But we don’t need the prompting. King did not ask permission of the White House to strive for justice; despite everything, he understood that “the goal of America is freedom”. How better to mark his birthday—and all the days thereafter—than to follow his example? If we are to be a free people, we must exercise that freedom and resist those who would fence it in through bonds of hate.

#GuestPost: Martin Luther King Day 2025: Number 21

Posted on by Galen Charlton | Author : | Guest Posts> Holidays> Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Maude Ballou and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Picture from the Ballou family)

The job of secretary to a minister is generally not associated with any particular risk to life or limb. But there are exceptions. From an interview published in the Washington Post (and republished by the Chicago Tribune in 2015:

Four days later [after the bombing of Ralph Abernathy’s house], Montgomery Improvement Association leaders supplied the chief of the highway patrol with a “List of persons and churches most vulnerable to violent attacks.” King registered at the top. Mrs. Maude Ballou was No. 21.

“Maybe I didn’t have the sense to worry,” says Ballou, who later spent three decades as a college administrator and a middle and high school teacher in North Carolina. “I didn’t have time to worry about what might happen, or what had happened, or what would happen,” she says in the cadences of a Baptist minister. “We were very busy doing things, knowing that anything could happen, and we just kept going.”

One time a man came down from Birmingham. “He said the White Citizens’ Council had sent him down there to tell me to stop working for civil rights or they would get my children. And that’s what got me, when you think about your babies. That really shook me,” says Ballou, with considerable equanimity. “But it didn’t stop me.”

Another night, working late in the office, alone, “somebody was outside watching. They were outside there in the car. And I found out later it was the KKK. But I was not afraid, for some reason,” she says. “I was a daredevil, I guess.”

What was the Montgomery Improvement Association? The organization that organized the Montgomery bus boycotts.

Who was Number 21, Maude Ballou? Martin Luther King, Junior’s first secretary. She worked in that role from 1955 to 1960, handling King’s voluminous correspondence (including putting off Malcolm X), keeping his affairs in order, and helping to set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office when King moved to Atlanta.

Ballou went on maternity leave in 1958, so Hilda Stewart Proctor, a niece of Harriet Tubman and active in other civil rights organizations, filled in for seven months. King clearly made an impression on her; later that year, after she had moved on to other work, she still offered to help with his correspondence prior to his trip to India:

If I do 100 letters between now and the time you leave for India that will peel down the pile a little won’t it?

AND I WOULD LIKE TO DO IT AS ANY FRIEND WOULD DO WHO IS INTERESTED IN GETTING YOU OFF TO INDIA. I shall donate my services to the cause.

Please do this. Of course, as usual, all your work will be held in the strictest confidence.

PLEASE LET ME HELP BECAUSE I STILL FEEL AS THOUGH I AM YOUR SECRETARY WITHOUT PORTFOLIO, SECRETARY AT LARGE, SECRETARY ON ‘MATERNITY’ LEAVE, not mine, of course.

King also had a significant effect on his final primary secretary, Dora McDonald, who worked for him from 1960 until his assassination in 1968. From a profile of her by Dudley Percy published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1989:

Working for Dr. King was her political awakening. Unlike many of those who found themselves aligned with the movement, Miss McDonald did not initially join because of a deep-felt conviction. Dr. King sought her out when he moved back to Atlanta from Montgomery, Ala., to co-pastor his father’s church.

…

Once she agreed to join his staff, his spirit was contagious.

“After I got into my job, and what I was doing, what we were doing, and what the movement meant, I never wanted to be doing something else. I was a part of something momentous.”

King’s spirit may have been contagious, but the Civil Rights Movement could not have been sustained on spirit alone. It was a collaborative, thoughtful effort that depended on organizational skills to pull off. Consequently, on this MLK Day, please give a thought not only to King and the other luminaries of the movement, but also to the secretaries, the bookkeepers and the office managers who kept things running.

As with my 2022 MLK Day post, I am grateful to the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford for making many of King’s papers available online.

MLK Giveaway Hop

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Blog Hops> Giveaways> Holidays> Martin Luther King Jr. Day> MLK Giveaway Hop

Welcome to the MLK Giveaway Hop hosted by Caffeinated Reviewer &  Mocha Girls Read !

In honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, observed on the third Monday of January each year – that’s today although his actual birthday is tomorrow, January 19 – Caffeinated Reviewer and Mocha Girls Read have created this giveaway hop of books celebrating Black authors. As book reviewers and book bloggers, we are celebrating diverse reading and drawing attention, we hope, to the richness of a more diverse reading experience.

To that end, this week I’ll be reviewing books by Black authors, no matter what their genre. And we’re all giving away books that express that diversity and/or gift cards so that our winners can read what’s available for themselves.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

For more terrific recommendations and more chances to win, be sure to visit the other stops on this hop!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter


What could Abraham Lincoln and Elizabeth Tudor possibly have in common?

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Uncategorized

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies coverThere has been a trend in pop literature in the past two years to re-write great works of literature to include horror elements, usually for comic or satiric effect. Some of the results are hilarious, some are fairly dreadful. Patient Zero in this trend (to mix metaphors in the extreme) was the strange, bizarre and absolutely screamingly funny in-joke that was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, written by the great Jane Austen and edited or amalgamized (or whatever) by Seth Grahame-Smith. This crazy thing, I personally think at least partially on the strength of a truly fantastic cover, was a surprise commercial success. Therefore, it begat sequels, spinoffs and sideways imitations.

Now they have slipped sideways into a variation of alternate history where real historic figures were supposedly vampire slayers or vampire hunters. I kid you not. On the surface, two historic figures less likely to imagine as even having the spare time to stalk vampires during the night than either Abraham Lincoln or Queen Elizabeth I could hardly be found. Why pick them? What could they have in common to make them likely, or even compelling, targets for such a treatment.

There are so many differences. Male and female, obviously. An elected leader vs a queen by right of inheritance. They are separated, not just by an ocean of salt water, but by an ocean of three centuries of time. And yet, they are both figures that fascinate in history. They both led their nations during eras when those nations were on the cusp on becoming, but had not yet become world powers. Times when their people were under grave threat. From our modern viewpoint, they are seen as leaders in times and places where personal leadership particularly mattered, and that they rose to the challenges they faced.

Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer CoverThe Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer, is written using a time-honored literary tradition. Elizabeth’s secret diaries were supposedly unearthed during the very real fire at Windsor castle in 1992 and the first volume is now being published, after the public events mentioned in the diary have been verified. The story is told in Elizabeth’s voice, her perspective on events in the very first weeks of her reign as she discovers that she is the heir, not just to the throne, but also to the powers of vampire slayer, the first in a millenium–the first since her ancestress, Morgaine, better known to history as Morgan le Fay.  And the King of the Vampires that Elizabeth must face is none other than Mordred, the illegitimate son of King Arthur.  Tying the vampires to the end of Camelot makes for masterful storytelling, and leaves the door open for a sequel.  Because there is a question that runs throughout the story.  Mordred may not be Elizabeth’s enemy.  Historically, England in Elizabeth’s time had many enemies, particularly Spain, as the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada showed.  Those enemies are very much present, as are the foes she has within her court.

Lucy WestonHowever, as much as I enjoyed the story itself, and the melding of the real history with the supernatural elements, trying to sell the idea that the editor of the diaries was the Lucy Weston from Bram Stoker’s Dracula was just one stage too far.  There’s a concept called the “willing suspension of disbelief” and that just tore it.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter coverAbraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, also pretends to be a publication of secret diaries.  But at least the “real” author (Seth Grahame-Smith again) isn’t claiming to be someone else fictional.  The author tries to make the diary entries sound like Lincoln, and to therefore sound like someone writing in the mid-19th century.  It’s a difficult trick to manage, and whether he completely succeeds, I’m not certain.

But the premise is compelling, if strange.  Abraham Lincoln experienced several deaths in his early years of the people surrounding him.  Deaths that contributed to the man he became.  Both his mother and his first love (if you subscribe to that belief in the first place).  In Grahame-Smith’s version, both of those deaths were caused by vampires.  And Lincoln becomes a vampire hunter out of a desire for revenge.  Unlike Elizabeth, he has no special talent for the work, he is simply big and strong and wants to kill as many as possible.

The Civil War, the defining event of the 19th century United States, is not left out.  In this version of both the War and Lincoln’s life, vampires control the Southern States, and are slave owners.  The vampires want to expand slavery, because slaves are not merely property, they are food.  No one questions what happens to someone else’s slaves.  Humans are always food to vampires, but this objectifies the practice even more.  Human slave owners are colluding with the vampires, either out of a desire to be on the winning side, out of a hope to be spared, or merely out of the knowledge that as collaborators, they will be taken last.  Discovering what vampires do to slaves makes Lincoln a firm abolitionist in addition to a vampire hunter.

But Lincoln has no particular talent for this work, he is just strong and vicious.  At the age of 16, he is nearly killed on a hunt.  He is saved by a vampire named Henry Sturgis, who, along with many of his fellow vampires, believes that slavery is wrong, that killing humans other than criminals for food is wrong, and that the slave holders and other “evil” vampires must be stopped at all costs.  Henry also declares that he has had glimpses of Lincoln’s destiny, and that Lincoln is “just too interesting to die.”

Martin Luther King Dream speechThis book was not about changing history.  Everything that needs to happen, does happen.  The world we know, does come to pass.  But history is viewed through a different lens.  “What if?” asks the author, and then views that “if” through Lincoln’s point of view.   The North still won the war.  Lincoln was still shot and killed at Ford’s Theatre.  The difference?  The vampires found the new Union without slavery inhospitable and fled the country.  John Wilkes Booth was a vampire.  But the image that sticks with me from the book is the ending.  Lincoln and Henry standing in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial, watching Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.