Martin Luther King
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The New Lynching Memorial and Legacy Museum Force Us to Bear Witness to Our Whole American Truth
It’s time to take this story to the masses.It’s time to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.May the other side of his-story now be entered into the record, the narrative, the myth of these United States of America. Forever and ever. Amen. “We love talking about 19th-century history and not…
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Dear White People: If a Memorial Dedicated to Lynchings of Black People Makes You Uncomfortable, Good
On April 26 of this year, the Equal Justice Initiative will open both a memorial and museum in Montgomery, Ala., dedicated to the victims of lynching in America post-Civil War. The memorial is called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the museum is called the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Both…
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Watch: King’s Mountaintop, 50 Years Later
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the news shocked the world. The day before, King gave his last speech, known today as the “Mountaintop” speech—one that some would call a prophecy. The civil rights leader went to Memphis, Tenn., to shed light on…
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Watch: Teens March 50 Miles in Honor of Martin Luther King Jr.
A group of teens began a 50-mile march in Mississippi on March 31 in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and to mark the 50th anniversary of his assassination. The group, which includes adult mentors, will finish its march on April 4 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where King was killed on April…
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Upholding the Dream: MLK’s Granddaughter Continues Her Family’s Legacy
Yolanda Renee King, the grandchild of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, made a surprise appearance Saturday at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. The 9-year-old roused the crowd with a passionate speech that would no doubt have made her activist grandparents proud, evoking the “I Have a Dream” speech…
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Episode 5: Children of the Memphis Sanitation Strike Share Their Stories
For the children of the Memphis, Tenn., sanitation strikers, the sounds, sights and smells of revolution, capitalism and white supremacy settled deep into their bones like the heaviest blues song, the kind that haunts and heals. Their childhood experiences were molded and shaped by fathers who struggled to provide for their families while also throwing…
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Legacy, Legacy, Legacy: What Best Befits a Civil Rights Icon?
As we wrap up the biannual phenomenon known as New York Fashion Week, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the amount of new fashion and trends we saw on the runways, forecasting what is to come in Fall/Winter 2018. But since we here at The Glow Up sit at the intersection of Fashion Week and Black…
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Episode 3: ‘I Know Hard Work’: Memphis Sanitation Strikers on Childhoods Sharecropping in the Jim Crow South
Sharecropping in the United States was slavery by another name, and many of the 1968 Memphis, Tenn., sanitation strikers were well acquainted with it. After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, Jim Crow laws intended to maintain white supremacy through violence, intimidation and segregation, spread across the Southern states—and some Northern states, too (pdf). Even…
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Yes, the MLK Estate Did Approve That Trash Dodge Super Bowl Ad
Updated Monday, Feb. 5, 2018, at 1:40 p.m. EST: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles U.S., which owns Ram, has made it all too clear that Martin Luther King Jr.’s estate was well aware of that Super Bowl ad and was “a very important part of the creative process every step of the way.” The statement was quoted…