“I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face Jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My fleets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” Martin Luther King Jr. “letter from Birmingham Jail“, April 16, 1963
The Social Aid & Pleasure Club All-Star Second-Line took to the street for what was supposed to be in support of New Orleans’ renewal and their own role in the city’s future. This second line ended like many of them do, in gun fire. This is known to locals and those do attend understand they may be the target of a stray or intentional bullet. The amount of people who attend out number the ones who fire the shots by 5,000/1 at least. It only takes one to fuck up the party though. Who is going to come into this already injured city and kick her while she is down? I dont understand it.
A simliar problem accoured on lower Decateur this weekend. Lower Decateur has been the home to many traveling musicians/Gypsys/hippies/gutter punks/vagrants and lots of folks that just dont fit into the majority of America.New Orleans takes them with open arms for the most part, hell alot of lower decateur was populated this way. Not to say they are not the focus of police harrassment or anything like that but they are part of New Orleans. This weekend I came home to find out that a new (decateur kid) decided that he was going to beat a lady bad enough to spen a few days in the hospital for $12 and then next night try and pull a man out of his car an beat him for money. A local policeman put it like this “If you dont take care of this bad egg then it is going to come down on all of ya’ll” he then said, “It is the same with the police, if one cop does something bad then the whole force feels the repercussion, so before this gets to that you need to care of this.”
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