#Robert F Kennedy Jr. US Politics For Liberty | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

crynotifier · 1 year ago

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Best Crypto to Buy Now August 23 – Toncoin, Binance Coin, Tron

With cryptocurrency prices experiencing a downturn and the S&P Global US manufacturing PMI slipping to 47 in August from 49 in July, a surprising supporter for Bitcoin has come forward—U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, who has been an advocate for civil liberties, used his digital platform today to express his perspective on Bitcoin and its alignment with the principles of civil freedoms.

Considering the current state of the cryptocurrency market, what are the best cryptos to buy now?

Kennedy’s endorsement comes at a critical juncture for Bitcoin as it confronts a challenging market environment. Bitcoin currently hovers around the mid-$26,000 range, while Ethereum is trading below the $1,700 level.

Meanwhile, the broader crypto market cap has slightly recovered to $1.07 trillion, marking an increase of 2.27% in the past 24 hours.

Kennedy’s approach to cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, diverges from traditional fiscal stances.

One of the cornerstones of his campaign has been the promise to exempt cryptocurrencies from capital gains taxes, should he win the upcoming presidential election.

Kennedy’s stance on Bitcoin injects fresh perspectives into the political landscape, but market complexities continue to shape prices. His views highlight future possibilities even as headwinds remain.

Toncoin, Sonik Coin, Binance Coin, Launchpad XYZ, and Tron are some of the best cryptos to buy now based on their impressive fundamentals and/or technical outlook.

Toncoin’s Bullish Momentum: Key Indicators Point to a Potential Shift

Source: TradingView / TONUSDT

Over the span of a month, Toncoin experienced a period of sideways trading within the $1.3 to $1.53 range, before it fell sharply, reaching a low of $1.152 on July 30.

Nonetheless, its recent bullish trading activity, coupled with a return to its previous trading range, points to a possible upcoming change in trend direction.

Analyzing Toncoin’s key technical indicators provides valuable insight into this possibility.

The 20-day EMA currently stands at $1.347, while the 50-day EMA is slightly higher at $1.369. The 100-day EMA, a longer-term trend indicator, stands notably higher at $1.501.

Toncoin’s current price, at $1.412, is above the 20-day and 50-day EMAs and is inching closer to the 100-day EMA. This move towards the longer-term EMA could signify that a bullish trend reversal is a strong possibility.

The RSI is at 57.02. This value is just above the neutral 50, indicating a slight bullish momentum. However, watch for any potential trend shifts in the RSI which could signal a change in market sentiment.

The MACD histogram stands at 0.009. With the MACD line above the signal line, this positive histogram value suggests bullish momentum.

The market cap and volume of Toncoin have also seen an uptick. The market cap has risen by 3.63% to $4.8 billion, while the 24-hour trading volume has increased by 5.81% to $29.6 million.

This increase in volume and market cap is a positive sign, as it shows increased trader interest and liquidity in the cryptocurrency.

Despite this bullish activity, Toncoin faces significant resistance ahead. The immediate resistance lies at the Fib 0.786 level at $1.455.

Beyond this, a highly contested resistance zone looms between $1.488 and $1.524, which coincides with the 100-day EMA at $1.501. Breaking this resistance could signal a stronger upward trend.

On the flip side, immediate support for Toncoin is found at the Fib 0.618 level at $1.390, followed by the 50-day EMA at $1.369. This support must hold to maintain the current bullish momentum.

While recent indicators suggest a potential trend reversal, traders should monitor these levels closely. Breakouts or breakdowns from these key levels could dictate the future short-term trajectory of Toncoin.

Sonik Coin Zooms Past Meme Coin Competitors; One of the Best Cryptos to Buy Now

Sonik Coin is picking up speed in its presale, zipping past $360,000 in funding from eager meme coin enthusiasts.

With two weeks left, this Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired meme coin has accumulated over 18% of its $2 million goal. Its steadfast presale traction defies recent negative price volatility in the meme coin space.

While meme coins typically ride on their viral appeal, Sonik Coin’s whitepaper suggests it might have the ingredients for cryptocurrency market success.

Distinctively, this meme coin presents token holders with the opportunity to reap staking rewards. By merely depositing into the staking smart contract, holders can engage in Sonik’s stake-to-earn functionality.

Even as the presale continues, numerous early adopters are opting to both ��buy and stake’, implying immediate utilization of their purchased tokens.

Data from the sonikcoin.com staking dashboard revealed that 13,382,391,452 out of 299,792,458,000 total tokens are presently staked.

A breakdown of Sonik Coin’s token supply indicates 50% dedicated to the presale, 40% to staking, and 10% to exchange liquidity. Based on these allocations, 7.6% of presale tokens have been staked already.

Tokens staked are locked in the smart contract for a minimum period of seven days. These tokens accumulate yield throughout their staking duration.

The reward distribution rate for $SONIK staking stands at 9125 $SONIK per Ethereum block over a span of four years. The earnings amount depends on the owned percentage of the staking pool and the staking duration.

Sonik Coin’s approach includes targeting the Asian cryptocurrency market, given the meme’s immense popularity in regions like Japan. The project has ensured accessibility by translating its website into multiple Asian languages.

Prioritizing investment security, Sonik Coin’s smart contract has undergone auditing, with findings available on its website. Such proactive measures underscore the project’s commitment to transparency and reliability.

For those interested, 50% of Sonik’s total token supply is up for public sale, with no team allocation. Transactions can be conducted using ETH or USDT on their platform, with an impending listing on the Uniswap decentralized exchange post-presale.

Visit Sonik Coin Now

Binance Coin (BNB): Navigating the Bearish Market with Resilience

Source: TradingView / BNBUSDT

Despite a modest 3.41% gain so far today, Binance Coin (BNB) remains entangled in a bearish market.

A close look at the primary technical indicators suggests the potential for further downside movement, even as the coin’s price shows signs of respite.

The 20-day EMA for BNB is currently at $227.7, which is significantly below both the 50-day EMA of $238 and the 100-day EMA of $252.8.

This shows a persistent bearish trend, as the coin’s price continues to hover below these key averages – a classic sign of a bear market.

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) has risen to 34.38 from yesterday’s 21.22. Though this indicates an improvement in buying pressure, the value is still below 50, highlighting the dominance of sellers in the market.

Meanwhile, the MACD histogram is at -2.2, up from yesterday’s -3. This negative MACD histogram indicates that the bearish momentum is still intact, albeit slightly diminished from the prior day.

The market capitalization of BNB has increased by 4.69% to $33.48 billion and the 24-hour trading volume is also up by 7.74% to $624.6 million. These increases are indicative of rising investor interest, however, they have yet to translate into a bullish reversal.

BNB is currently facing immediate resistance at the horizontal zone of $220 to $231, followed by the 20-day EMA at $227.7. For BNB to enter a bullish phase, it needs to break through these resistance levels with substantial volume.

On the flip side, BNB has immediate support at the extended reverse Fib levels of Fib -0.382 to Fib -0.236, which form a potential support zone between $183 to $197.7.

If the bearish momentum continues and BNB breaks below this support zone, it could trigger further selling pressure.

While BNB showcases some signs of recovery, the overarching technical indicators suggest that the bearish trend is far from over. Traders should exercise caution and closely monitor these key levels before making any decisions.

Supercharge Your Portfolio with Launchpad XYZ’s Token Bonus and VIP NFT Passes

Launchpad XYZ has introduced an enticing 20% token bonus for new and existing contributors to its $LPX token presale.

However, prospective buyers need to act fast – the bonus will decrease by 1% every week. This limited-time offer provides an extra incentive to participate in the presale and become early adopters of the $LPX token.

The token bonus offer is just one of the novel incentives introduced by Launchpad XYZ.

The platform has also implemented an exclusive five-tier premium access system for presale buyers utilizing NFTs. The access level depends on the amount of tokens purchased, giving investors extra motivation.

So far, the presale has attracted healthy fundraising of over $1.4 million. The new token bonus and VIP NFT passes are expected to accelerate contributions even further.

The $LPX token is currently priced at $0.0445 and will maintain its value throughout the presale. Additionally, while the presale is active, users can access the alpha call Telegram group for free.

According to data from the team’s blog, this alpha group has provided 23 setups yielding over 100% returns and 8 setups with over 1000% profits, including a 7000% gainer this week. The group also supplies trading advice and insights on trending coins.

A unique aspect is the introduction of access to VIP alpha groups through airdropped NFTs. Users must hold these NFTs to maintain alpha access. Tiers have been created for all user levels, from basic to expert traders.

At its core, Launchpad XYZ will utilize Apollo, an AI chatbot that will assist users in developing a personalized trading framework based on risk profile, market sentiment, news, and actionable insights.

The platform will also use a proprietary ranking system called Launchpad Quotient that analyzes over 400 data points to evaluate crypto projects.

Launchpad XYZ is building an all-in-one Web3 platform, not merely a crypto trading portal.

Its ambitious roadmap includes a gaming hub, decentralized exchange, token directory, and metaverse library, seeking to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3 and facilitate crypto mass adoption.

Visit Launchpad XYZ Now

Tron (TRX) on the Rise: Technical Indicators Signal Potential Upside

Source: TradingView / TRXUSDT

Tron (TRX) has shown promising upward momentum for the past 5 days, with its price movement exhibiting a series of positive technical indicators.

The cryptocurrency has gained 7% since bouncing off the Fib 0.382 level of $0.07262 on August 18.

TRX is exhibiting a 2.86% upward movement so far today, surpassing key levels such as the Fib 0.5 level of $0.07515 and the 100-day EMA at $0.07551.

Additionally, TRX extended its positive momentum by breaking through the 20-day EMA of $0.07635 and the 50-day EMA of $0.07696. This breakout from these key EMAs is a significant bullish signal, indicating a potential for further upward momentum.

The RSI has increased to 53.54 from yesterday’s 45.16, suggesting growing strength in the bullish trend. An RSI reading above 50 typically indicates that the cryptocurrency is being actively bought, supporting the case for a potential upward trajectory.

The MACD histogram has also turned positive. The MACD histogram reading of 0.00016, up from yesterday’s -0.00005, is a strong bullish signal, suggesting that upward momentum may continue to build.

Trading at $0.07764, TRX is currently nearing the significant resistance level of $0.07768, which corresponds to the Fib 0.618 level. This level has been a persistent obstacle for TRX throughout the month of August.

Given these technical signals, traders should watch for a potential break above this resistance. A successful breach of the Fib 0.618 level could trigger further buying interest, potentially propelling TRX to new monthly highs.

Immediate support is found at the 50-day EMA at $0.07696, followed by the 20-day EMA at $0.07635. A break below these levels could indicate a shift in the current bullish sentiment.

The technical indicators suggest a strong bullish sentiment in the TRX’s price action, implying the potential for a retake of the Fib 0.618 level. However, traders should remain cautious and watch for confirmations of the bullish breakout or signs of reversal.

Disclaimer: Crypto is a high-risk asset class. This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. You could lose all of your capital.

The Information contained in or provided from or through this website is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

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blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years ago

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Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates... Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a beloved community that is finally at peace with itself.

- John Lewis, civil rights campaigner and US congressman (1940-2020)

John Lewis, who went from being the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington to a long-serving congressman from Georgia and icon of the civil rights movement, died at the grand old age of 80 years old on 17 July 2020.

Born to sharecroppers in Troy, Alabama, in February 1940, Lewis became a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He joined the Freedom Rides that began in 1961, traveling to the south by bus to fight segregation on interstate buses.

A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he became its chair in 1963 and helped organise the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, as activists tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, Lewis was walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his overcoat when he was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured. Nationally televised images of the brutality forced attention on racial oppression in the south. That incident, along with other beatings during peaceful protests, left Lewis with scars for the rest of his life.

Within days, King led more marches in Alabama. President Lyndon B Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which became law later that year.

After Selma and with each passing month, SNCC became more militant. The organization grew to reflect the disappointment of those who saw progress as coming too slow. “Something was born in Selma, but something died there, too,” Lewis wrote in “Walking With the Wind.” “The road of nonviolence had essentially run out.” (King’s assassination in 1968 was another devastating blow against those advocating nonviolence.)

In 1966, Lewis lost the chairmanship to Stokely Carmichael, champion of the slogan “Black Power.” “My life, my identity, most of my very existence, was tied to SNCC,” Lewis recalled in “Walking With the Wind.” “Now, so suddenly, I felt put out to pasture.”

In 1968, he worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. On the night of the California primary, he was with the campaign at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.

He eventually got himself elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia and in time became its ‘conscience’ for members on both sides of the political aisle. As time passed, he came to be seen as the living embodiment of the civil rights movement.

Many awards came his way: a Lincoln Medal from Ford’s Theatre, a Preservation Hero award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the NAACP Spingarn Medal, the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center, a Dole Leadership Prize named for Bob Dole, and a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for lifetime achievement, among others. Stephan James portrayed him in the 2014 movie “Selma.” Universities showered him with honorary degrees. In 2016, the U.S. Navy announced that it was naming a ship, a replenishment oiler, after him.

Out of all the stories I’ve read about John Lewis one story in particular stood out for me and captures something of what is missing in our current turbulent times.

In 2009, Lewis met with a white man named Elwin Wilson, who was among those who assaulted Lewis and other Freedom Riders in 1961. Following Obama’s election in 2008, Wilson said he had an epiphany and traveled to Washington to apologise for his violent acts and seek Lewis’ forgiveness. Lewis gave it freely.

“It’s in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence,” Lewis later told the New York Times. “That’s what the movement was always about, to have the capacity to forgive and move toward reconciliation.”

If only today’s well intenioned but woefully intellectually muddled social justice warriors, both in the USA and increasingly here in the UK, could follow Lewis’ words and deeds.

#lewis #john lewis #quote #civil rights #america #icon #sjw #history

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tinyshe · 4 years ago

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“August 28, 2020, the Children's Health Defense, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., launched a European branch of the organization. In a press conference1 announcing the new branch, Kennedy discussed how governments are using fear to control and manipulate the population.

Acting as quasi-government agencies, public health organizations such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization are pushing vaccines using the same fear tactics, while simultaneously removing the regulatory oversight that used to ensure vaccines are properly safety-tested.

Corruption in the political system, however, has destroyed the trust these agencies need to get people to willingly take these fast-tracked vaccines, and this despite the fact that the media keep regurgitating the prescribed propaganda. Kennedy also highlights how people like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are helping to promote this global vaccination agenda.

"Point a finger at that source of their fear and you can make human beings do anything you want. You can make them go to the slaughter like sheep; you can make them obey." ~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As a result of all this corruption, there's no independent, unbiased buffer between greedy corporations and the world's most vulnerable populations — our children. This is a global problem, Kennedy says, and the press is facilitating it by helping to create so much fear in the peoples' minds that they will obey whatever the health agencies say, no matter how illogical the demands.

Vaccines Are Not Routinely Tested Against Placebo

Kennedy explains how he ended up spearheading the fight for vaccine safety. He runs the largest water protection group in the world, the Waterkeeper Alliance. In the early 2000s, he was involved in lawsuits over mercury discharges by coal burning power plants.

Around the same time, he learned of the presence of mercury in vaccines, and that this source was a much larger source of mercury exposure than contaminated fish was. Initially, his goal was simply to get the mercury removed from vaccines, but as he dug deeper, he realized "there were larger problems with vaccines."

One of the biggest problems was, and still is, the fact that vaccines in the U.S. are not safety tested. "They have an exemption that is not available to any other medical product," Kennedy says, explaining that when the vaccine program was initially launched, the goal was to make sure vaccines could be rapidly developed and deployed in response to biological attacks by foreign countries.

As a result, regulatory impediments — including safety testing vaccines against placebos, which the gold-standard in medical safety testing — were removed.

"My very narrow purpose in starting the Children Health Defense was to address this problem and to get vaccines properly safety tested, because if they're not safety tested, nobody can tell you with any medical authority whether that vaccine is injuring more people than it's saving," Kennedy says.2

"As we continued on with this advocacy it became very clear that there were other problems as well. There [were] problems with the corruption in our political system.

The pharmaceutical companies had not only corrupted our politicians with huge amounts of lobbying money, they had captured the �� agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from public health threats: the CDC, the FDA, the HHS. They had captured the press in our country by huge influxes of advertising dollars which had neutralized the press.

They had effectively subverted American democracy by neutralizing all of those institutions that the Founding Fathers of our nation had created to stand between a greedy corporation and a vulnerable child.

The Congress had been corrupted. The regulatory agencies were captured; they had become the sock puppets for the industry they're supposed to regulate. The press had been sidelined.

And worst of all, they had passed a law in our country in 1986 that gave pharmaceutical companies complete immunity from liability. So, there was no incentive for any of those companies to make vaccines safe …

If we win this battle in just one nation, the United States, we're still going to lose it globally. So, we need people of good will, people who have courage, people who have a nonconformist way of thinking, who understand that we are being lied to, that the entire political structure today is saturated in pharmaceutical propaganda."

The Power of Fear

As noted by Kennedy, totalitarian nations have always used the power of fear to make citizens comply with authoritarian rule. Without fail, it's been shown that all you have to do to engineer compliance, no matter how horrific the ramifications, is to tell people they have something to fear, and that they will be safe if they follow your lead.

"Point a finger at that source of their fear and you can make human beings do anything you want. You can make them go to the slaughter like sheep; you can make them obey," Kennedy says.

A famous quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt is "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He understood that fear is ultimately what strips us of our human rights and drives a society into totalitarianism, and that the only way to circumvent such a fate is to bravely resist fear. Today, one of the biggest threats (or so we're told) is global pandemics.

"Governments love pandemics the same way that they love wars because it gives them power; it gives them control and it gives them the capacity to impose obedience on human beings," Kennedy notes.

Today, we also have something no previous tyrant has had, namely the technology to track, trace, control and manipulate individuals wherever they live. Most people are surrounded by electronics and wireless devices that harvest every imaginable data point about your personal life.

Digital currency will complete the net of tyranny. Once all cash economies have been abolished, "they have absolute control over us because they will be able to tax every transaction," Kennedy says. A digital currency economy will also ensure total compliance by the masses. If you disobey, they can simply restrict or shut down your bank account.

"Many people argue that this pandemic was a plandemic, that it was planned from the outset, it's part of a sinister scheme," Kennedy says. "I can't tell you the answer to that. I don't have enough evidence.

A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don't know, but I will tell you this, if you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them. Once you create them, they will be abused; 100% guarantee that they will be abused."

People in Authority Lie

Kennedy goes on to stress that the pushback seen around the world against mask mandates, vaccines, social distancing and lockdowns are not because there's a willful ignorance of science, but that no real science is being presented; science is actually being withheld and suppressed.

"What we know is that we're not being dealt with honestly," he says. "We're being told, 'This is the science,' but it's an appeal to authority. It's science because Tony Fauci and Bill Gates tell us it's science.

We want to see the studies. We want to see the studies on hydroxychloroquine. We want to see the studies on whether the lockdown is killing more people than the coronavirus. We want to see real science and real risk assessment.

My father told me when I was a child, 'People in authority lie.' If we are going to continue to live in a democracy we need to understand that people in authority lie. People in authority will abuse every power that we relinquish to them, and right now we are giving them the power to micromanage every bit of our lives.

Twenty-four hours a day they're going to know where we are, they're going to know the money that we spend, they're going to have access to our children. They're going to have the right to compel unwanted medical interventions on us."

Why Are We Ignoring the Nuremberg Charter?

As noted by Kennedy, this is precisely what the Nazis did to prisoners during World War II. After the war, the world was so horrified by the atrocities of the Nazi camps, including and especially the medical testing that took place, the Nuremberg Code,3 which details the ethical framework for medical experimentation, was enacted.

"We all pledged … we would never again impose unwanted medical interventions on human beings without informed consent," Kennedy says. "Yet in two years, all of that conviction has suddenly disappeared. People are walking around in masks when the science has not been explained to them. They are doing what they're told.

These government agencies are orchestrating obedience, and it is not democratic; it's not the product of democracy. It's the product of a pharmaceutical driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare where the apocalyptical forces of ignorance and greed will be running our lives and ruining our children …

The launch of this organization, Children's Health Defense, in Europe is a beachhead; it's an announcement to the world that we are not going to take it. We are building institutions to fight your institutions. You have global institutions and we now have a global institution …

We are not going to let you take our democracy away. We are not going to let you take our health away. We are not going to let you take our freedoms away. We are not going to let you take our children away."

Do Not Trust the Medical or National Security Establishment

In the Ron Paul Liberty Report above, former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul interviews4 Kennedy about who really killed his father and uncle, and why. In summary, the evidence suggests his father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated by a CIA agent hired as a security guard.

Kennedy reviews some of the history of the CIA — how it was initially established as an espionage organization tasked solely with intelligence gathering, only to transform into a paramilitary agency engaged with the overthrowing of democracies around the world and other nefarious and antidemocratic activities.

He also touches on the infamous CIA program called MK Ultra, in which individuals are brainwashed to carry out orders, including murders, against their own will.

The conversation eventually turns to vaccine safety and the folly of ignoring published science showing there are significant problems — problems that the medical establishment is refuting without any actual counter-evidence.

They also discuss data suggesting the COVID-19 lockdowns may have caused more deaths than the virus itself, as well as the civil rights issues involved. "I think the data are really clear, that quarantine is going to kill far more people than COVID-19" Kennedy says.

Pandemic Responses Are Doing Far More Harm Than Good

He cites research from the 1980s that looked at the impact of unemployment on human life. This kind of research flourished in the wake of American industries increasingly being shipped overseas, causing rising unemployment.

The most famous of these studies, Kennedy says, found that for every one-point rise in unemployment there were 37,000 excess deaths, 4,000 excess imprisonments and 3,300 excess admissions into mental institutions.

"In addition to that, we have disruptions to medical supply chains and food supply," Kennedy notes. "There are millions of people starving around the world because of the quarantines. We've lost, already, about 50,000 minority businesses, permanently, in [the U.S.] What is that going to do?"

Kennedy cites a report from a hospital in San Francisco that stated they saw one year's-worth of suicides in a single month, a 1,200% increase. He also cites British research showing that while there were 30,000 excess deaths in nursing homes during a five-week period during the lockdown, only one-third of them were due to COVID-19.

In other words, the death rate from isolation was double that of the virus itself. People didn't get the proper medical care for chronic conditions and so on. Kennedy also rightly points out that what we will see — and are already seeing — is the obliteration of the middle-class and the shift of wealth from the poor to the already ultra-rich.

Then there's the rapidly approaching question of vaccination. Children and young adults under the age of 20 basically have a zero risk of dying from COVID-19, so are we going to force them to gamble with their future health by taking a fast-tracked and unproven vaccine in the name of protecting the elderly who are at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19? "That is a very dicey ethical question," Kennedy says.

"This is like an apocalyptical battle; it's really something I never thought would happen in my lifetime, where all the values of our country are being eroded," Kennedy says, pointing out that in 1968, there was a bird flu pandemic5 that had a higher mortality rate than COVID-19, "and we all went to Woodstock. It was just part of life."

Today, pandemics have become a tool of tyranny, and the "biosecurity" agenda is a globalist agenda that ultimately seeks to gain total control by stripping away human rights and the rights of countries. As noted by Kennedy, the fear level is totally out of proportion to the real threat of COVID-19, as are the government-prescribed responses.

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fakenigel · 7 years ago

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The Domestic Cold War and Reagan’s California (1967-1975)

It got by George Washington

The ideas of justice, liberty, and equality

. . .

Ronald Reagan, it got by him

Hollyweird

Acted like a actor

Acted like a liberal

Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California

Now he acts like somebody might vote for him for president

-Gil Scott-Heron, “Bicentennial Blues,” The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron (1975)

Reagan’s California

Ronald Reagan is associated with many of the most fundamental changes that have taken place in American politics over the last five decades. The “Reagan Revolution” (along with Thatcherism, the UK’s counterpart) is often seen as being responsible for the neoliberal turn that American politics and economics have taken since the 1980s. Reagan ushered in anti-union and pro-business policies that fall under the banner of supply-side economics, or more euphemistically, “trickle-down economics.” Reagan also did his part to revolutionize the American security state. The Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan administration officials were caught selling arms to Iran (who was under an arms embargo) in order to fund the Nicaraguan anti-communist Contra fighting forces, went a long way in institutionalizing the use of private military contractors and defense companies.[1] Reagan accomplished all of this as the president of the United States, an office he held from 1981 to 1989.

A less examined portion of Reagan’s political career, but one in which he and his political associates also affected extensive political change, is his tenure as the governor of California. Reagan served two consecutive terms as the governor of California, from 1967 until 1975. The Watts riots in Los Angeles occurred two years prior to his first term in 1965. Thus, as a Republican, law-and-order governor, Reagan presided over some of the most tumultuous moments of California and the United States’ history. These include, but are not limited to:

1967 - Summer of Love; thousands of youths migrate from around the United States to California’s Bay Area to be a part of a burgeoning counterculture movement

June 6, 1968 - Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; occurs roughly five years after his brother’s, John F. Kennedy’s assignation, three years after the assassination of Malcolm X, and just over two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

January 17, 1969 – Black Panther shootout with rival United Slaves (US) organization; shootout left two Panthers (Bunchy Carter and John Huggins) dead, US and their leader Ron Karenga believed to possibly be opportunistically working with state and federal security apparatus to neutralize the Black Panther Party.

August 9, 1969 – Manson Family murders Sharon Tate and four others; Charles Manson and his white youth followers lead to association of the psychedelic, hippie and drug counterculture with violence.

December 9, 1969 – LAPD instigates an early morning shootout by initiating a surprise raid on the Los Angeles Black Panther Party headquarters; raid comes only 5 days after Fred Hampton was assassinated in Chicago by a similar early morning unannounced “raid”; Panthers survive shootout by shooting back and holding their ground until media and the public arrive to scene.

August 7, 1970 – Jonathan P. Jackson killed in attempt to kidnap and take hostages from a Marin County, California courtroom, which he planned to trade for the release of his brother and their transportation to a county supportive of the Black Panther Party;

August 21, 1971 – George Jackson, probably the most well-known face of California’s revolutionary prisoner movement, is killed by guards in San Quentin prison during an alleged escape attempt; controversy exists over the facts surrounding the escape attempt, particularly how he supposedly smuggled in a pistol without the guards seeing, as well as the circumstances of the guard’s gunshots that took his life.

December 16, 1971 – California Correctional Officers Association (CCOA) in conjunction with Attorney General Evelle Younger’s office attempt to frame Soledad psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Rundle (a self-ascribed “New Republic liberal”[2]) for two killings of Soledad guards after he publicly advocated for prison reform, especially for prisoners in need of mental health treatment; conspiracy is discovered because the prisoner (Tony Pewitt) who was used by the state to frame Rundle refused to go through with the plan and alerted him, at which point Rundle contacted private detectives and media.

1973-1975 – Rise and demise of the Symbionese Liberation Army; a Maoist group led by an escaped black convict, Donald DeFreeze, and comprised of majority white student radicals goes on a highly publicized string of violent acts in the name revolution, including the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, the college-aged heir to the Hearst family fortune.

This small list of political violence during Reagan’s governorship is by no means exhaustive, but it does comprise many of the better known incidents. One trend that is clear is that as time went on, the radical left became associated with greater amounts of violence, both as the supposed aggressors and as recipients of state violence. All of this contributed to the sentiment that many participants in the 1960s and 1970s radical left today hold themselves, that America’s radical left was predisposed toward counterproductive and self-destructive violence. This violence soured the view of the radical left in the eyes of the general American public and led to defeat of the movement. The trend of increasing violence applies to all sects of the radical left—the black power movement, the youth student movement, hippies, Maoists, radical prisoners, and even “defectors” from wealthy families who ended up involved in radical left activities (like Patricia Hearst). The combined effect of all of this violence was the delegitimation and sundering of radical left politics.

Charles Manson was associated with the hippie youth counterculture.[3] His crimes marked a shift from the initial, positive, psychedelic Summer of Love to the mood after the Manson murders and into the 1970s which was much darker. By the time Manson was arrested, the psychedelic positivity associated with LSD in the late 1960s had been replaced by a heroin and amphetamine fueled paranoia and pessimism. In the case of the Black Panther Party, it is more evident that authorities were attempting to eliminate the organization and that instigating violence against the Panthers (such as the LAPD shootout) was a method toward this end.

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) came along in the mid-1970s and seemed to synthesize these separate currents into one organization. The SLA was a self-described Maoist insurgency group headed by a black escaped prisoner (Donald DeFreeze) and composed of radical students from multiple ethnic backgrounds (but primarily middle class whites). The group kidnapped Patricia Heart and forced her to commit crimes with the organization, such as bank robbery and car theft. The SLA provided the final proof to the public that the radical left had devolved into something unnecessarily violent, shortsighted, and counterproductive. These are ideal circumstances for a conservative law and order governor to prosper. And prosper Reagan did. Reagan won two elections and chose not to run for a third term before eventually becoming the country’s president in 1980.

Amidst this period of sustained political violence and turmoil Governor Reagan greatly increased the power of domestic police and intelligence in the state of California. To be more specific, it appears that Reagan (with assistance from Richard Nixon’s presidential administration) ran a counterinsurgency program designed to neutralize and delegitimation the radical left opposition throughout the state. The term counterinsurgency, a term primarily associated America’s foreign military operations, is important here. While domestic police are, in theory, not supposed to care about private citizens’ political beliefs, military counterinsurgency doctrines are precisely concerned with the political beliefs of their targets. In fact, in a counterinsurgency warfare, elimination of an ideology may be seen as more important and vital than elimination of particular individuals and leaders.

This reality is ignored because of an American exceptionalist attitude and bias that tends to whitewash the nature of domestic intelligence practices and operations. This whitewashed view says the government security apparatus (from the federal agencies to local police) operates by different rules domestically than it does internationally. One way this manifests itself is in the idea that anyone who is victimized or killed by the domestic security apparatus deserved such treatment on some level, even if the public still widely condemns the action. It is understood that in modern warfare, beginning primarily with Vietnam, the United States and its allies assassinate important enemy officials outside of direct engagement and that these assassinations are carried out to hamper the enemy’s effectiveness (a macro consideration)—not in response to particular actions carried out by the individuals (a micro consideration). For example, the 2008 joint Israeli and U.S. car bomb assassination of Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyah, known to be a particularly intelligent and effective military tactician, did not come in the course of combat, it was carried out clandestinely away from an active battlefield. The assassination received condemnation from some Western allies,[4] but the methodology was clear. Mughniyah was killed for simply being a highly skilled leader for the enemy. In the academic literature on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, such tactics are vividly referred to as attempts at “leadership decapitation.” There is hesitation from domestic observers within the United States to ascribe such simple and undemocratic motivations for the repression (via assassination and incarceration) that the Black Panther Party and others faced, but the facts of the situation suggest that the Panthers faced a concerted leadership decapitation effort from the United States government, and much of this was executed by and through Reagan’s gubernatorial administration.

I argue that the sustained counterinsurgency operations against California’s radical leftists in the 1960s and 1970s have more in common with the American intelligence community’s counterinsurgency efforts overseas in theaters like Italy, Latin America, and Indochina (where the Vietnam War was raging) than they have in common with more sanitized narratives that take the purported actions and statements of groups like the SLA at face value. Historical investigation has shown that the Western powers, as well as lesser powers like the authoritarian Latin American regimes of the era, operated under the same general counterinsurgency doctrine. This doctrine was developed by a myriad of anti-communist hardliners from a variety of countries, but British, French, American, and former-Nazi intelligence and military personnel seem to have been key in the intellectual development of the doctrine. Declassified documents and information gathered from governmental and non-governmental investigations have revealed that a key element of this doctrine was that Western intelligence operatives ought to implicate communists (and the wider radical left) in terrorism and indiscriminate violence. The function of this violence would be to strengthen the existing status quo by discrediting the left and driving a scared and disoriented public into the arms of the state and its security apparatus. The existence of such activities in the so-called Second and Third Worlds are well established (Operation CONDOR in Latin America and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and Indochina), but irrefutable evidence of similar tactics was discovered by Italian parliamentary investigators in the early 1990s. Italian investigators concluded that neo-fascist elements of the Italian state and security apparatus committed terrorist attacks in the 1960s through 1980s that were wrongly attributed to anarchists and communists, as well as clandestinely encouraging other terrorist attacks and forms of political violence.

There is an immense value to this type of inquiry. There is an obvious and inherent value in gaining a deeper understanding of how modern states (and private organizations) engage in repression and stamp out dissent. This ought to interest anyone with even a passing interest in radical, left, or anti-capitalist politics. Further, these tactics were deployed against non-revolutionary liberal reformists, not just radical leftists. Thus, this research should give anyone who is interested in genuine democracy, representative or otherwise, serious pause. This research also challenges existing narratives of the decline of the American radical left. By challenging the basis of California’s political violence of the 1960s and 1970s and suggesting that the state played a more prominent role in committing and encouraging violence than is commonly understood, one challenges the narrative that the radical left caused its own downfall by sliding toward violence. Such an investigation into American political violence of the 1960s and 1970s is overdue. I hope to spur such an investigation and conversation.

The American security apparatus invests in public relations perpetuate the myth that organizations like the FBI and CIA operate within the confines of the law domestically. Juan Bosch, the democratically-elected president of the Dominican Republic who was deposed in a coup orchestrated by Lyndon Johnson’s administration, argued that America had developed a government with power and decision-making bifurcated along domestic and international lines.[5] Bosch argued that the Pentagon (he uses the term as a catch-all for the American security establishment), what he saw as the ultimate power in the United States, had accepted to stay out of domestic affairs as long as it was given absolute supremacy in international affairs. But incidents like the Watts riot (and the other urban ghetto uprisings), as well as growing radicalism in America’s middle class white youth, led the American security establishment to conceive external and internal “insurgency” as one and the same. Churchill quotes Lawrence from The New State Repression (1985) concerning this conceptual shift in security and intelligence:

[I]nsurgency [was no longer viewed as] an occasional erratic idiosyncrasy of people who are oppressed and exploited, but a constant occurrence—permanent insurgency, which calls for a strategy that doesn’t simply rely on a police force and a national guard and an army that can be called out in an emergency, but rather a strategy of permanent repression as the full-time task of security forces.[6]

Churchill presents the quote from Lawrence in the context of domestic politics, but this shift in counterinsurgency strategy was taking place globally, in part because the United States (after World War II) was in a position of power and coordination over the rest of the world’s capitalist countries and their security agencies. The shift was simply that insurgency was no longer viewed as an episodic threat. The threat of insurgency, specifically communist, was constant, and thus required constantly active repressive forces to combat it. Reagan takes control of California amidst conceptual shift. The individuals that Reagan goes on to appoint to various position within California’s security apparatus reflect this conceptual shift as well as its international scope. California’s security apparatus under Reagan employed many international Cold Warriors. They brought their counterinsurgency expertise from theaters of “hot” war back home; not enough attention has been paid to how this expertise was deployed domestically. If there is an “American exceptionalist” conception of domestic policing, then these activities would be precisely the type that would be missing from, or obscured within, the mainstream historical record and popular consciousness. These are a few of the Cold Warriors and intelligence veterans that worked in California within Reagan’s administration:

Evelle Younger. Younger served as California’s Attorney General from 1971 until 1979. He began his career as a promising young FBI Special Agent under J. Edgar Hoover. He joined the precursor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), at the age of 24. Prior to his appointment to the position of California’s Attorney General, Younger was Los Angeles’s District Attorney and presided over the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Younger was directly involved in the establishment and operation of governmental programs like the California Organized Crime and Intelligence Branch (OCCIB) as well as LAPD’s notorious Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS).

Louis Giuffrida. Giuffrida was chosen by Reagan to head the California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI), a program established by Reagan during his final gubernatorial term to develop and disseminate

effective methods of neutralizing California’s then-vibrant radical left and to ‘train police forces from all across the U.S. and from many other countries in counterinsurgency . . . tasks that could not, at that time, be conducted at FBI headquarters or the International Police Academy, or other federal police training institutions.’[7]

Giuffrida had been an army counterintelligence officer, and according to Churchill, had long been “associated with organizations on the extreme right.”[8] For a thesis he wrote while attending the US Army War College, Guiffrida discussed and planned for “the establishment of concentration camps to imprison potentially millions of black Americans in the event of a revolutionary uprising in the United States.”[9]

William Hermann. Herrmann is a mysterious figure. He served as the primary counterintelligence advisor for Reagan while he was governor, but he held a multitude of positions over his shadowy career. According to Schreiber, Hermann also worked for the System Development Corporation, the Stanford Research Institute, the Rand Corporation, and the Hoover Center on violence.[10] Hermann also worked with another Reagan confidante, Dr. Earl Brian (Reagan’s Secretary of Health), at the controversial Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, a behavior modification program hosted at UCLA.[11] Hermann was publicly opposed to the kinds of social protest that were taking place within California’s black and youth populations at the time.[12]

Dr. Earl Brian. Brian was Reagan’s Secretary of Health. Brian was a proponent of behavior modification (what Schreiber suggests is a euphemism for mind control which was something of an obsession for intelligence agencies during the 1960s) in the pursuit of crime prevention.[13] Under Reagan’s securitized California, open advocates for racial and economic equality were essentially criminals, not to mention the actual radical prison reform movement that was taking place.

Colton Westbrook. Westbrook is unique. Unlike the other characters listed previously, Westbrook did not have a personal relationship with Reagan. He was also black. But Westbrook is important because of his background and role that he played within California’s security and intelligence apparatus. Westbrook appears to have been the undercover handler of Donald DeFreeze prior to his escape from formation of the Symbionese Liberation Army and escape from prison. This occurred while Westbrook was creating and running the Black Cultural Association (BCA) at Vacaville Medical Facility. Schreiber describes the BCA as

ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride in Vacaville inmates. In reality, it became a cover for an experimental project to explore the extent to which unstable or susceptible prisoners could be controlled for the purpose of infiltration of Bay Area radical groups.[14]

Westbrook is alleged to have been a CIA agent, though he denied this charge. Other aspects of Westbrook’s known employment history suggest that he was employed with the CIA in some fashion. From 1967 to 1969, Westbrook was an advisor to the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch. Westbrook’s cover was that he was working for the Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), a known CIA front corporation. Westbrook’s time in South Vietnamese overlaps with the time period when the Phoenix Program was active. The Phoenix Program was a Vietnam War-era clandestine American counterinsurgency, assassination, and psy-ops program designed to weaken the Vietcong through methods like assassination. If overseas methods of counterinsurgency were transmuted back to the domestic front, then individuals like Westbrook would have been the personnel capable of completing such a transportation.

A fair rebuttal to concern over the presence of foreign intelligence operatives finding employment in Reagan’s administration is that domestic law enforcement is a perfectly logical career for any veteran of the armed services. If one looked at the demographics of individuals in high ranking domestic law enforcement officials across the country during this era, one would find many veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But Schreiber poignantly describes the likelihood of someone like Colston Westbrook ending up as the head of the Black Cultural Association:

Of all the “outside guest coordinators” that could have been chosen for the Black Cultural Association, such as people with experience in social work, criminal justice, or organizations advocating prisoner rights, Vacaville wound up with Colston Westbrook, undercover liaison for the CIA during the Phoenix Program. And he was handpicked by former psy-ops officer William Herrmann, then advising Governor Ronald Reagan on counterintelligence. And it happened at the height of the black prisoner reform movement, right after the CIA’s Operation CHAOS provided funds to Vacaville, which was an ongoing MKULTRA and MKSEARCH site for experimentation on prisoners.[15]

Several of these individuals continued working with Reagan during his time as POTUS, indicating that these were actual relationships, and not disinterested political appointments. In 1981 Reagan appointed Guiffrida to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Brian and Hermann were both also given positions in Reagan’s White House administration, but both would end up marred by scandal.[16] Given these individuals roles in America’s foreign military and intelligence apparatus, and given Lawrence’s suggestion that insurgency went from being conceived of as an episodic problem to a constant threat during this time, the presence of such counterinsurgency experts in close proximity to one of the “ground zeroes” of America’s radical left and left counterculture is striking. Clearly Reagan’s gubernatorial administration prioritized the black power movement (generally represented by the Black Panther Party) and largely white, student, youth radical movement (personified by Students for a Democratic Society and the hippies) as threats to state and national “public order.” The backgrounds, skills, and expertise of individuals who held security and intelligence positions during Reagan’s tenure reflect this prioritization.

Belew discusses the way that many right-wing, anti-communist paramilitary organizations during this time were populated with Vietnam veterans who wanted to continue the anti-communist effort at home in the United States.[17] If Belew’s convincing analysis is correct, then it is reasonable to suspect that law enforcement may have been seen by some superpatriotic veterans as a way to continue the war against communist subversion at home. While civilians tend to see a clear distinction between the purpose of (and tactics utilized by) domestic police and the military when its engaged in conflict overseas, the domestic law enforcement personnel with overseas military and intelligence anti-communist backgrounds may have seen their purpose as a continuation of their overseas efforts, just with a different set of constraints and rules of engagement, rather than as a distinctly different activity.

[1] Erik Prince, perhaps America’s (and the world’s) best known private warrior, learned much of what he knows from Oliver North, the Reagan official who supposedly masterminded the Iran-Contra strategy.

[2] Don Jelinek, “The Soledad Frame-Up,” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 22, 1972, 4.

[3] Despite Charles Manson espousing racist beliefs and the notion that he hoped to start a race war with his murders, Manson and his crimes were associated with the white youth counterculture.

[4] Meron Rapoport, “Italian FM Says Mughniyah Killing in Damascus Was Act of ‘Terror,’” Haaretz, February 22, 2008, https://www.haaretz.com/1.4994953.

[5] Juan Bosch and Helen Lane, Pentagonism: A Substitue for Imperialism (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968), 51.

[6] Ward Churchill, “The Security Industrial Complex,” in The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 47.

[7] Churchill, 48.

[8] Churchill, 48.

[9] Matthew Cunningham-Cook, “Contingency Plans,” Jacobin, Spring 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/contingency-plans.

[10] Brad Schreiber, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).

[11] Schreiber

[12] Schreiber

[13] Schreiber

[14] Schreiber

[15] Schreiber

[16] “Eventually, both Brian and Herrmann worked with Reagan when he became president. In a highly complex and internecine case, Brian was accused by former Attorney General Elliot Richardson of stealing software from a company called Inslaw. Brian was also an alleged accomplice in the Reagan attempt to undercut President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free Americans kidnapped by Iran. Brian was never indicted on either charge. Herrmann, who was later affiliated with the CIA and FBI, also participated in the aforementioned Iran arms-for-hostages deal, the “October Surprise,” on behalf of Reagan.” (Schreiber)

[17] Kathleen Belew, “Theaters of War: Mercenaries, Paramilitarism, and the Racist Right from Vietnam to Oklahoma City” (Yale University, 2011), 13.

#hopefully this is how my dissertation starts

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Anti-Vaxxers Could Fuel Spike in Childhood Diseases: 'It Will Be Horrific'

— By Steve Friess | October 06, 2021 | Newsweek

A recent gathering in a Quality Inn ballroom in rural Bradley, Illinois, offered a glimpse—terrifying to most epidemiologists, thrilling to longtime vaccine "safety" activists—of America's growing political divide over vaccinations and its implications for the nation's health. Ostensibly, the meeting was a community forum about employer mandates for COVID vaccines that the organizer expected to draw 80 people in this overwhelmingly Republican exurb of Chicago. Instead, more than 300 people piled in, mostly to complain about the notion that anyone—a boss, a school, a government—could force them to take any vaccines at all. As one Libertarian county commissioner told the crowd: "I will fight for your right to believe in whatever god, medicine or way of life you choose."

The event is being replicated in some form or another in cities and towns across America, emblematic of a growing grassroots movement of people who believe that vaccine mandates—for COVID, yes, but increasingly for other diseases as well—are an affront to their personal freedom. That represents a marked shift from pre-pandemic times, when vaccine opponents typically based their reasoning on medical concerns and were largely comprised of a few religious sects and a small number of left-leaning activists seeking explanations for rising rates of autism. As the anti-vaxx mandate movement gains political traction, particularly on the right, medical experts fear it could not only cripple efforts to eradicate COVID but could also lead to a surge in long-conquered diseases, from mumps to whooping cough to smallpox.

"Those [more established] vaccines have had a long history of use, so there's certainly data that suggests that they're relatively safe. But it always has to be a choice of individuals. You can't have government forcing that on us" - Conservative group Action 4 Liberty president Jake Duesenberg

"There are some more conservative states where we are likely to see other non-COVID vaccine mandates under attack, and it is very worrisome," says Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "If we have some of these pediatric infectious diseases come back, it will be horrific."

Even before President Joe Biden's September 9 announcement of a litany of aggressive COVID vaccine mandates—covering an estimated 100 million Americans, including federal health workers and companies with more than 100 employees—evidence of changes in policy and sentiment toward such rules was cropping up, led by the right. This summer the Tennessee Department of Health, reportedly pushed by GOP lawmakers, directed its staffers to stop conducting "proactive outreach regarding routine vaccinations," including those for childhood diseases, HPV and influenza. Larry Elder, the top Republican vote-getter in the failed recall effort against California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, told the Los Angeles Times editorial board in August, "I don't believe that the state should tell a parent whether or not a child should be vaccinated. That's an intrusion of state power." In Minnesota this month, the conservative group Action 4 Liberty, which boasts an email list of more than 100,000 recipients, began hammering a leading Republican candidate for governor for refusing to sign the group's "Stop Vaccine Mandates" pledge.

A group demonstrators hold signs as they protest against mandated vaccines outside of the Michigan State Capitol on August 6, 2021 in Lansing, Michigan. Emily Elconin/Getty

"Those vaccines have had a long history of use, so there's certainly data that suggests that they're relatively safe," the group's president, Jake Duesenberg, tells Newsweek. "But it always has to be a choice of individuals. You can't have government forcing that on us."

In all, some 22 percent of Americans now identify as "anti-vaxxers," defined as people who support vaccine refusal and "embrace the label as a form of social identity," according to a report by researchers at Oklahoma State University, Texas A&M University and others, published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. Underscoring concerns of public health experts, the study also found identifying as an anti-vaxxer to be predictive of increased opposition to childhood vaccine requirements.

Meanwhile, signs are also mounting about the partisan nature of growing opposition to vaccines and vaccine mandates, and the shift from medical to libertarian reasoning. Asked in a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation whether getting the COVID vaccine is a matter of "personal choice" or "part of everyone's responsibility to protect the health of others," more than 70 percent of Republicans saw it as a personal choice vs. just 27 percent of Democrats. And according to a Twitter analysis by Renee DiResta, research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, reported in The New York Times, even anti-vaxxers whose opposition in the pre-COVID era was focused on concerns about autism and toxins are now evolving their messaging to talk about freedom and "vaccine choice."

Paramedics transport a COVID patient in Houston, Texas, where the governor has banned vaccine mandates. John Moore/Getty

"The coalescing of previously distinct groups that are now more aligned on this issue of opposing vaccines is new," says Douglas Opel, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital and author of numerous papers on vaccine hesitancy among parents. "The politicization of the COVID-19 vaccine development and authorization process has been a concern of all of us on what that might mean for vaccine confidence and the sustainability of immunization programs generally."

The Road to Here

Until recently, mandates for vaccinations—which mostly surface when parents try to enroll their children in daycare facilities or schools—were a relatively uncontroversial, routine part of preventing the spread of mostly vanquished infectious diseases. Every state has such mandates, and all but six allow exemptions for reasons of either religious or "personal belief." In California, Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, New York and West Virginia, only exemptions for medical reasons are acceptable.

All 50 states have vaccine mandates, typically dating back decades. Here, a young boy receives a smallpox vaccine as classmates watch circa 1967. United States Department of Health Education and Welfare/Getty

Opposition to such mandates in the decades before COVID included the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the actress Jenny McCarthy, both liberal skeptics of vaccine science who promoted theories about widespread vaccine side effects that have been aggressively debunked and dismissed by the medical community. When the country experienced outbreaks of diseases such as measles—an illness that in 2000 was declared eradicated in the U.S. by the World Health Organization—the overall numbers were in the dozens or hundreds, which is relatively small. In California, where a 2014 outbreak was traced to Disneyland, and New York, where surges in 2019 were connected to insular Orthodox Jewish communities, lawmakers quickly voted to eliminate the ability of parents to opt out of vaccinations for religious or personal reasons.

Yet what scares epidemiologists now is that many conservatives who denounce vaccine mandates are eliding the medical questions of whether they are safe. Instead, says David Rosner, a Columbia University historian who specializes in the intersection of politics and public health, they're focusing on a political view that requiring them is wrong.

"We are at the beginning of a much more profound change that may lead to resistance to other vaccines but also may lead to disintegration of any sense of social obligation, social cohesion and social purpose," he warns. "It's part of the questioning of what the country is and what it represents. When you see this kind of breakdown and unwillingness to work together, even under the most obvious circumstances where we've had more than 650,000 people die, it feels like the beginning of a major dividing point."

Many opponents—like Elder and Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel, who likened vaccine mandates to the Gestapo—are themselves vaccinated for COVID-19 and aren't voicing criticism of the safety or efficacy of the shots themselves. They merely insist that it's not the government's role to force the shots on people, many of whom question the record speed of the vaccines' development, prefer to rely on natural immunity the body may develop after being exposed to COVID or believe a wide range of misinformation, from the myth that the shots contain microchips capable of tracking movement to concerns of potential harm to the reproductive systems of women of child-bearing age.

After receiving COVID shots this spring, Californians in Richmond wait in an observation area. David Paul Morris/Blooberg/Getty

"I am not against anyone getting the COVID vaccine, it's their choice," says Duesenberg, who declined to say if he is vaccinated against COVID. "From someone that's not in the medical profession, there are risky classes of individuals who, if they were to contract the COVID-19 disease, it could be very bad for them. There's a big argument for them to get the COVID vaccine. But for young, healthy individuals, that risk-reward is way different. I've heard even doctors ask why a young healthy person would get the vaccine when you don't know the long-term effects of it. Either way, it can't be the government's choice."

That notion, though, threatens to upend more than a century of bipartisan acceptance and judicial support for the government's ability to impose vaccine requirements. As recently as mid-August, in fact, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, declined to block a requirement from Indiana University that all students and faculty be vaccinated for COVID. In doing so, Barrett upheld a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, featuring all Republican appointees, that said vaccine requirements "have been common in this nation" and citing a 1905 Supreme Court decision upholding a smallpox vaccine mandate.

Still, just because the practice is constitutional doesn't mean state legislatures must continue to mandate immunizations. Nor does it mean that local boards of health will continue to be stingy about allowing exemptions if the political winds shift in such a way as to make that position untenable. The outcome, experts say, could be significant regional differences in vaccine protections.

"It's hard to know how big that group of vaccine refusers could potentially grow, but it's very clear that they will be in pockets, that they will reside together in different communities, where then we will see increased rates of certain vaccine-preventable diseases, of whooping cough, of measles, potentially of COVID, of influenza—all vaccine-preventable diseases" as a result, says Mary Anne Jackson, dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and a former member of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.

GOP House colleagues look on as Maryland Representative Andy Harris, a doctor and vaccine mandate opponent, speaks at a news conference on the Delta variant this summer. Alex Wong/Getty

Factoring into the heightened risk is the very nature of viruses, which bide their time in asymptomatic carriers waiting for hosts whose defenses are down. Tara Kirk Sell, a public health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, says the outcome is that any drop in vaccination coverage in a locality could present opportunities for, say, chicken pox or rubella to sicken and spread to other vulnerable people in the community, including people too young or medically fragile to be immunized.

Tara Kirk Sell at a congressional testimony. House Science Committe

"There are strong reasons why we require vaccines in schools, because we want to make sure that kids don't end up with measles or mumps and we don't want them spreading disease throughout the community," says Sell. "It's extremely concerning that this whole concern about COVID-19 vaccines is spiraling out into those other necessary public health requirements."

Signs of Trouble Ahead

The Centers for Disease Control's data so far is of little use in assessing the impact of COVID politics on vaccination rates for other diseases. The compliance rate for the usual litany of childhood shots was more than 95 percent as of the agency's most recently published numbers, but that only goes through 2019—before the pandemic's onset.

Still, based on spot reports from different pockets of the country, the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases noted "an alarming decline in vaccination rates" last year that it says puts individuals of all ages at risk of contracting vaccine-preventable diseases. Miami-Dade County in Florida, for instance, saw a 60 percent drop in the number of children's vaccines administered in April 2020 vs. April 2019; in Michigan in May 2020, half of infants five months or younger were behind on their vaccines; in New York City, vaccine dose delivery fell 91 percent between March and May 2020. But experts attribute those drops in shots more to parents' fears of taking their kids to doctors at the height of the pandemic lockdown out of fear of contracting COVID than to raging vaccine hesitancy.

Anecdotally, however, many pediatricians see a baffling, troubling sea change. Joel Heidelbaugh, a physician who oversees family practice residents at the University of Michigan School of Medicine at a clinic in suburban Detroit, says he now sees parents who refuse vaccines for their children at least twice a week whereas such refusals pre-COVID occurred a few times a year.

"I saw a baby today who didn't get their first vaccine in the hospital because the parents didn't want to give it, and then I saw a 14-year-old for a sports physical who had not gotten the COVID vaccine and was due for an HPV and a meningitis vaccine but the mom declined both of those," Heidelbaugh says. "When I suggested that they get the COVID vaccine for the 14-year-old, Mom vehemently told me no and said she'd thrown out everything in her house that's made by Johnson & Johnson because she's against the COVID vaccine and thinks it causes more harm than good." (J&J makes one of three approved COVID vaccines in the U.S.)

To those who have long toiled in the movement to question mass vaccinations and their safety, though, such stories are encouraging. "We're seeing many more people than before the pandemic asking serious questions," says Mary Holland, chief counsel to the Children's Health Defense, a non-profit advocacy group founded by RFK Jr., son of the late California Senator Robert Kennedy, that recently organized protests around the country in response to mask and vaccine mandates. "Is it safe? Is it effective? Were the clinical trials adequate? Is there liability protection? What's happening to the people who have been injured or have died? We're certainly seeing a level of interest in the movement for vaccine safety that we didn't see before the pandemic, and we are happy to see that renewed level of interest and education."

Brian Hooker, a longtime vaccine skeptic and one of the most prominent researchers to push a debunked claim that childhood vaccinations cause autism, agrees. "It's quite astounding to have more than 20 percent" of the public say they're anti-vaxxers, notes Hooker, a bioengineer and chair of the math and science department at Simpson University, a small Christian private college in Redding, California. "And that's not just specific to the COVID vaccine. This is something that is really, really new."

US President Joe Biden give remarks on COVID-19 response & vaccinations in the State Dining Room of the White House on June 18, 2021. Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty

Proof Is Elusive

It's more difficult to persuade vaccine-hesitant parents like those he's encountering than it used to be, Heidelbaugh says, because their political views make them unreceptive to medical information that contradicts whatever they've heard from conservative or social media.

"I try to explain what they're due for, what vaccines we recommend, I'm happy to give literature on each of the vaccines so they understand what it's for and potential side effects," he says. "Then I explain to them the risks of being unvaccinated and tell them that there's a reason we have eradicated these diseases. And there's a reason we're starting to see some of these diseases which are preventable." Does that work? "Rarely," he says.

Sell believes this is the best approach even if it is increasingly futile: "It's much harder to debate political beliefs or values. For both sides, it is about protecting kids. You can't just come in and say, 'You're wrong,' because nothing turns someone off faster than that."

Another challenge vaccine proponents face is new data showing no recent uptick in various preventable childhood diseases over the past year when many children did not get their vaccinations on schedule. While the CDC doesn't have national numbers yet for 2020, it issued an alert in June to urge parents to catch up after analyzing data from 10 areas of the country and found, for instance, that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination rate dropped by an average of 63 percent among children 2 to 8 years old in 2020. Yet there was no corresponding outbreak of those illnesses and, in fact, some other childhood afflictions saw declines.

An EMS medic from the Houston Fire Department prepares to transport a Covid-19 positive girl, age 2, to a hospital on August 25, 2021 in Houston, Texas. John Moore/Getty

There are easy explanations for that outcome, experts say. Just as kids didn't go to doctors at the height of the pandemic lockdowns, they also didn't go to daycare or in-person school—and many wore masks and sanitized their hands when they did encounter friends and relatives—so they were cosseted from exposure to a variety of germs.

But activists like Holland nonetheless point to these declines as more proof that the sky won't fall if kids don't get their shots or don't get them on the schedule that epidemiologists and virologists insist is necessary for peak effectiveness. "We've published articles showing that infant deaths went down, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome went down during the pandemic," Holland says. (Most public health experts see no link between vaccines and SIDS; correlation doesn't equal causation.) "There are some positive associations for lower vaccine uptake that should be researched and followed up on. But instead, there's now a lot of emphasis on families catching up on their vaccines and staying with the regular schedule."

The Pushback Against Pushback

Pro-vaccine advocates say they have one important secret weapon in this battle: parents. Jackson says the overwhelming share do vaccinate and, she expects, will become more vocal if anti-vaxxers threaten the health of their kids and other loved ones. She predicts they will clamor for data on the percent of unvaccinated children in daycares and school classes, she says, and parents will make decisions about where their children go based on that information.

"There are some pediatric practices that now refuse to have kids in their practice whose parents have refused to vaccinate," she says. "That's a trend that the American Academy of Pediatrics worries about because those children also need quality providers. But pediatricians say they can't have situations where under-vaccinated children are sitting in my waiting room and could potentially bring in measles to a vulnerable population."

What's more, the cost of more frequent disease outbreaks on local health-care systems could make medical coverage more expensive for people in under-vaccinated areas. "In states that don't want to vaccinate, the insurance companies are going to either raise the premiums for all of us or they're going to have to put those states into a higher rate bracket because the risk pools in those states will go through the roof," predicts Connecticut State Representative Stephen Meskers, who earlier this year sponsored a successful measure that repealed the ability of parents to opt out of vaccine mandates based on religious or personal views. "It's not inexpensive to put people on ventilators and to have them in hospitals. So if you want to go that route, you're either going to let the hospital overfill or you're going to have to build better occupancy, and both of those have economic costs."

A shot of hope: A COVID vaccine manufacturing site in Germany: Recent data shows the shots are more than 90 percent effective in preventing deaths from the disease. Thomas Lohnes/AFP/Getty

Health economists such as Jonathan Kolstad of University of California at Berkeley back up this notion. He says, "If there's an increase in the cost of supplying healthcare in a certain area, we would expect in a competitive insurance market that premiums would increase."

Holland of the anti-vaccine-mandate Children's Health Defense believes her movement emerges from COVID in a much different, stronger place. She's less sure, though, that they can count on unqualified support from the GOP. "It's accurate to say that the Democratic Party is very aligned with the vaccine agenda, but I don't think you can say vaccine choice is cemented into the Republican party platforms," she says

And Meskers, the Connecticut State Representative, says much will depend on whether the COVID vaccines do stem the tide of the pandemic and whether the outcome differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated remain so dramatically different. A recent CDC study found that unvaccinated Americans were nearly five times more likely than vaccinated people to contract COVID and about 29 times more likely to be hospitalized than fully vaccinated individuals; a separate study found the vaccines to be more than 90 percent effective in preventing deaths. But that could change.

"We run the risk of a breakthrough variant where the death rate picks up," Meskers says. "Are we going to get a breakthrough where the vaccine loses its effectiveness? If we do, we're going to go into another round of 'Well, the vaccine was never going to work.' And that's scary for what it will say to people about all the other vaccines out there."

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King (/kɔːˈrɛtə/; April 27, 1927 – January 30, 2006) was an American author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1953 until his death in 1968. Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. King was an active advocate for African-American equality. King met her husband while in college, and their participation escalated until they became central to the movement. In her early life, Coretta was an accomplished singer, and she often incorporated music into her civil rights work.

King played a prominent role in the years after her husband's 1968 assassination when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women's Movement and the LGBT rights movement. King founded the King Center and sought to make his birthday a national holiday. King finally succeeded when Ronald Reagan signed legislation which established Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She later broadened her scope to include both opposition to apartheid and advocacy for LGBT rights. King became friends with many politicians before and after Martin Luther King's death, most notably John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy's phone call to her during the 1960 election was what she liked to believe was behind his victory.

In August 2005, King suffered a stroke and was left paralyzed on her right side and unable to speak. Five months later, she died of respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. King's funeral was attended by four of five living U.S. Presidents and by over 10,000 people. She was temporarily buried on the grounds of the King Center, until she was interred next to her husband. King was honored for her activism in promoting human rights. King was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2009. She was the first African-American to lie in State in the Georgia State Capitol upon her death. King has been referred to as "First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement."

Childhood and education

Coretta Scott was born in Marion, Alabama, the third of four children of Obadiah Scott (1899–1998) and Bernice McMurry Scott (1904–1996). She was born in her parents' home with her paternal great-grandmother Delia Scott, a former slave, presiding as midwife. Coretta's mother became known for her musical talent and singing voice. As a child Bernice attended the local Crossroads School and only had a fourth grade education. Bernice's older siblings, however, attended boarding school at the Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute. The senior Mrs. Scott worked as a school bus driver, a church pianist, and for her husband in his business ventures. She served as Worthy Matron for her Eastern Star chapter and was a member of the local Literacy Federated Club.

Obie, Coretta's father, was the first black person in their neighborhood to own a vehicle. Before starting his own businesses he worked as a policeman. Along with his wife, he ran a clothes shop far from their home and later opened a general store. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors after Scott refused to lend his mill to a white male logger Her maternal grandparents were Mollie (née Smith; 1868 – d.) and Martin van Buren McMurry (1863–1950) – both were of African-American and Irish descent. Mollie was born a slave to plantation owner Jim Blackburn and Adeline (Blackburn) Smith. Coretta's maternal grandfather, Martin, was born to a slave of Black Native American ancestry, and her white master who never acknowledged Martin as his son. He eventually owned a 280-acre farm. Because of his diverse origins, Martin appeared to be White; however, he displayed contempt for the notion of passing. As a self-taught reader with little formal education, he is noted for having inspired Coretta's passion for education. Coretta's paternal grandparents were Cora (née McLaughlin; 1876 – 1920) and Jefferson F. Scott (1873–1941). Cora died before Coretta's birth. Jeff Scott was a farmer and a prominent figure in the rural black religious community; he was born to former slaves Willis and Delia Scott.

At age 10, Coretta worked to increase the family's income. She had an older sister named Edythe Scott Bagley (1924–2011) an older sister named Eunice who did not survive childhood, and a younger brother named Obadiah Leonard (1930–2012). According to a DNA analysis, she was partly descended from the Mende people of Sierra Leone. The Scott family had owned a farm since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money and shared a bedroom with their parents. At age 12, Coretta Scott entered Lincoln School as a seventh grader, and with temperament changes. Scott also developed an interest in the opposite sex.

Coretta described herself as a tomboy during her childhood, primarily because she could climb trees and recalled wrestling boys. In addition, she also mentioned having been stronger than a male cousin and threatening before accidentally cutting that same cousin with an axe. His mother threatened her, and along with the words of her siblings, stirred her to becoming more ladylike once she got older. She saw irony in the fact that despite this early physical activities, she still was involved in nonviolent movements. Her brother Obadiah thought she always "tried to excel in everything she did." Her sister Edythe believed her personality was like their grandmother Cora McLaughlin Scott's, after whom she was named. Though lacking formal education themselves, Coretta Scott's parents intended for all of their children to be educated. Coretta quoted her mother as having said, "My children are going to college, even if it means I only have but one dress to put on."

The Scott children attended a one room elementary school 5 miles (8 km) from their home and were later bused to Lincoln Normal School, which despite being 9 mi (14 km) from their home, was the closest black high school in Marion, Alabama, due to racial segregation in schools. The bus was driven by Coretta's mother Bernice, who bused all the local black teenagers. By the time Scott had entered the school, Lincoln had suspended tuition and charged only four dollars and fifty cents per year. In her last two years there, Scott became the leading soprano for the school's senior chorus. Scott directed a choir at her home church in North Perry Country. Coretta Scott graduated valedictorian from Lincoln Normal School in 1945 where she played trumpet and piano, sang in the chorus, and participated in school musicals and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio during her senior year at Lincoln. After being accepted to Antioch, Scott applied for Interracial Scholarship Fund for financial aid. During her last two years in high school, Coretta lived with her parents. Her older sister Edythe already attended Antioch as part of the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, which recruited non-white students and gave them full scholarships in an attempt to diversify the historically white campus. Coretta said of her first college:

Antioch had envisioned itself as a laboratory in democracy, but had no black students. (Edythe) became the first African American to attend Antioch on a completely integrated basis, and was joined by two other black female students in the fall of 1943. Pioneering is never easy, and all of us who followed my sister at Antioch owe her a great debt of gratitude.

Coretta studied music with Walter Anderson, the first non-white chair of an academic department in a historically white college. She also became politically active, due largely to her experience of racial discrimination by the local school board. She became active in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the college's Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. The board denied her request to perform her second year of required practice teaching at Yellow Springs public schools, for her teaching certificate Coretta Scott appealed to the Antioch College administration, which was unwilling or unable to change the situation in the local school system and instead employed her at the college's associated laboratory school for a second year.

New England Conservatory of Music and Martin Luther King Jr.

Coretta transferred out of Antioch when she won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. It was while studying singing at that school with Marie Sundelius that she met Martin Luther King, Jr. after mutual friend Mary Powell gave King her phone number after he asked about girls on the campus. Coretta was the only one remaining after Powell named two girls and King proved to not be impressed with the other. Scott initially showed little interest in meeting him, even after Powell told her that he had a promising future, but eventually relented and agreed to the meeting. King called her on the telephone and when the two met in person, Scott was surprised by how short he was. King would tell her that she had all the qualities that he was looking for in a wife, which Scott dismissed since the two had only just met. She told him "I don't see how you can say that. You don't even know me." But King was assured and asked to see her again. She readily accepted his invitation to a weekend party.

She continued to see him on a regular basis in the early months of 1952. Two weeks after meeting Scott, King wrote to his mother that he had met his wife. Their dates usually consisted of political and racial discussions, and in August of that year Coretta met King's parents Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. Before meeting Martin, Coretta had been in relationships her entire time in school, but never had any she cared to develop. Once meeting with her sister Edythe face-to-face, Coretta detailed her feelings for the young aspiring minister and discussed the relationship as well. Edythe was able to tell her sister had legitimate feelings for him, and she also became impressed with his overall demeanor.

Despite envisioning a career for herself in the music industry, Coretta knew that would not be possible if she were to marry Martin Luther King. However, since King possessed many of the qualities she liked in a man, she found herself "becoming more involved with every passing moment." When asked by her sister what made King so "appealing" to her she responded, "I suppose it's because Martin reminds me so much of our father." At that moment, Scott's sister knew King was "the one."

King's parents visited him in the fall and had suspicions about Coretta Scott after seeing how clean his apartment was. While the Kings had tea and meals with their son and Scott, Martin, Sr. turned his attention to her and insinuated that her plans of a career in music were not fitting for a Baptist minister's wife. After Coretta did not respond to his questioning of their romance being serious, Martin, Sr. asked if she took his son "seriously". King's father also told her that there were many other women his son was interested in, and had "a lot to offer." After telling him that she had "a lot to offer" as well, Martin Luther King, Sr. and his wife went on to try and meet with members of Coretta's family. Once the two obtained Edythe's number from Coretta, they sat down with her and had lunch with her. During their time together, Martin Luther King, Sr. tried to ask Edythe about the relationship between her sister and his son. Edythe insisted that her sister was an excellent choice for Martin Luther King, Jr., but also felt that Coretta did not need to bargain for a husband.

On Valentine's Day 1953, the couple announced their plans to marry in the Atlanta Daily World. With a wedding set in June, only four months away at that time, Coretta still did not have a commitment to marrying King and consulted with her sister in a letter sent just before Easter Vacation. King's father had expressed resentment in his choice of Coretta over someone from Alabama, and accused his son of spending too much time with her and neglecting his studies. Martin took his mother into another room and told her of his plans to marry Coretta and told her the same thing when he drove her home later while also berating her for not having made a good impression on his father. When Martin declared his intentions to get a doctorate and marry Coretta after, Martin, Sr. finally gave his blessing. In 1964, the Time profile of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was chosen as Time's "Man of the Year", referred to her as "a talented young soprano." She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority

Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr. were married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her mother's house; the ceremony was performed by Martin Jr.'s father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Coretta had the vow to obey her husband removed from the ceremony, which was unusual for the time. After completing her degree in voice and piano at the New England Conservatory, she moved with her husband to Montgomery, Alabama, in September 1954. Mrs. King recalled: "After we married, we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where my husband had accepted an invitation to be the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Before long, we found ourselves in the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Martin was elected leader of the protest movement. As the boycott continued, I had a growing sense that I was involved in something so much greater than myself, something of profound historic importance. I came to the realization that we had been thrust into the forefront of a movement to liberate oppressed people, not only in Montgomery but also throughout our country, and this movement had worldwide implications. I felt blessed to have been called to be a part of such a noble and historic cause."

Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)

On September 1, 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. became the full-time pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was a sacrifice for Coretta, who had to give up her dreams of becoming a classical singer. Her devotion to the cause while giving up on her own ambitions would become symbolic of the actions of African-American women during the movement. The couple moved into the church's parsonage on South Jackson Street shortly after this. Coretta became a member of the choir and taught Sunday school, as well as participating in the Baptist Training Union and Missionary Society. She made her first appearance at the First Baptist Church on March 6, 1955, where according to E. P. Wallace, she "captivated her concert audience."

The Kings welcomed their first child Yolanda on November 17, 1955, who was named at Coretta's insistence and became the church's attention. After her husband became involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King often received threats directed towards him. In January 1956, King answered numerous phone calls threatening her husband's life, as rumors intended to make African-Americans dissatisfied with King's husband spread that Martin had purchased a Buick station wagon for her. Martin Luther King, Jr. would give her the nickname "Yoki," and thereby, allow himself to refer to her out of her name. By the end of the boycott, Mrs. King and her husband had come to believe in nonviolent protests as a way of expression consistent with biblical teachings. Two days after the integration of Montgomery's bus service, on December 23, a gunshot rang through the front door of the King home while King, her husband and Yolanda were asleep. The three were not harmed. On Christmas Eve of 1955, King took her daughter to her parents's house and met with her siblings as well. Yolanda was their first grandchild. King's husband joined them the next day, at dinner time.

On February 21, 1956, King's husband announced he would return to Montgomery after picking up Coretta and their daughter from Atlanta, who were staying with his parents. During Martin Luther King, Sr.'s opposition to his son's choice to return to Montgomery, Mrs. King picked up her daughter and went upstairs, which he would express dismay in later and tell her that she "had run out on him." Two days later, Coretta and her husband drove back to Montgomery. Coretta took an active role in advocating for civil rights legislation. On April 25, 1958, King made her first appearance at a concert that year at Peter High School Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama. With a performance sponsored by the Omicron Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, King changed a few songs in the first part of the show but still continued with the basic format used two years earlier at the New York gala as she told the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The concert was important for Coretta as a way to continue her professional career and participate in the movement. The concert gave the audience "an emotional connection to the messages of social, economic, and spiritual transformation."

On September 3, 1958, King accompanied her husband and Ralph Abernathy to a courtroom. Her husband was arrested outside the courtroom for "loitering" and "failing to obey an officer." A few weeks later, King visited Martin's parents in Atlanta. At that time, she learned that he had been stabbed while signing copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom on September 20, 1958. King rushed to see her husband, and stayed with him for the remainder of his time in the hospital recovering. On February 3, 1959, King, her husband and Lawrence Reddick started a five-week tour of India. The three were invited to hundreds of engagements. During their trip, Coretta used her singing ability to enthuse crowds during their month long stay. The two returned to the United States on March 10, 1959.

House bombing

On January 30, 1956, Coretta and Dexter congregation member Roscoe Williams's wife Mary Lucy heard the "sound of a brick striking the concrete floor of the front porch." Coretta suggested that the two women get out of the front room and went into the guest room, as the house was disturbed by an explosion which caused the house to rock and fill the front room with smoke and shattered glass. The two went to the rear of the home, where Yolanda was sleeping and Coretta called the First Baptist Church and reported the bombing to the woman who answered the phone. Martin returned to their home, and upon finding Coretta and his daughter unharmed, went outside. He was confronted by an angry crowd of his supporters, who had brought guns. He was able to turn them away with an impromptu speech.

A white man was reported by a lone witness to have walked halfway up to King's door and throwing something against the door before running back to his car and speeding off. Ernest Walters, the lone witness, did not manage to get the license plate number because of how quickly the events transpired. Both of the couple's fathers contacted them over the bombing. The two arrived nearly at the same time, along with her husband's mother and brother. Coretta's father Obie said he would take her and her daughter back to Marion if his son-in-law did not take them to Atlanta. Coretta refused the proclamation, and insisted on staying with her husband. Despite Martin Luther King, Sr. also advocating that she leave with her father, King persisted in leaving with him. Author Octavia B. Vivian wrote "That night Coretta lost her fear of dying. She committed herself more deeply to the freedom struggle, as Martin had done four days previously, when jailed for the first time in his life." Coretta would later call it the first time she realized "how much I meant to Martin in terms of supporting him in what he was doing".

John F. Kennedy phone call

Martin Luther King was jailed on October 19, 1960, for picketing in a department store. After being released three days later, Coretta's husband was sent back to jail on October 22 for driving with an Alabama license while being a resident of Georgia and was sent to jail for four months of hard labor. After her husband's arrest, King believed he would not make it out alive and telephoned her friend Harris Wofford and cried while saying "They're going to kill him. I know they are going to kill him." Directly after speaking with her, Wofford contacted Sargent Shriver in Chicago, where presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was campaigning at the time, and told Shriver of King's fears for her husband. After Shriver waited to be with Kennedy alone, he suggested that he telephone King and express sympathy. Kennedy called King, after agreeing with the proposal.

Sometime afterward, Bobby Kennedy obtained King's release from prison. Martin Luther King, Sr. was so grateful for the release that he voted for Kennedy and said "I'll take a catholic or the devil himself if he'll wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law's eyes." According to Coretta, Kennedy said "I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just want you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me." Kennedy's contact with King was learned about quickly by reporters, with Coretta admitting that it "made me feel good that he called me personally and let me know how he felt."

Kennedy presidency

During Kennedy's presidency, she and her husband had come to respect him and understood his reluctance at times to not get involved openly with civil rights. In April 1962, Coretta served as delegate for the Women's Strike for Peace Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Martin drove her to the hospital on March 28, 1963, where King gave birth to their fourth child Bernice. After King and her daughter were due to come home, Martin rushed back to drive them himself. After her husband's arrest on April 12, 1963, King tried to make direct contact with President Kennedy at the advisement of Wyatt Tee Walker, and succeeded in speaking with Robert F. Kennedy. President Kennedy was with his father Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr, who was not feeling well. In what has been noted as making Kennedy seem less sympathetic towards the Kings, the president redirected Mrs. King's call to the White House switchboard.

The next day, President Kennedy reported to King that the FBI had been sent into Birmingham the previous night and confirmed that her husband was fine. He was allowed to speak with her on the phone and told her to inform Walker of Kennedy's involvement. She told her husband of her assistance from the Kennedys, which her husband took as the reason "why everybody is suddenly being so polite." In regards to the March on Washington, Coretta said, "It was as though heaven had come down." Coretta had been home all day with their children, since the birth of their daughter Bernice had not allowed her to attend Easter Sunday church services. Since Mrs. King had issued her own statement regarding the aid of the president instead of doing as her husband had told her and report to Wyatt Walker, this according to author Taylor Branch, made her portrayed by reports as "an anxious new mother who may have confused her White House fantasies with reality."

Coretta went to a Women Strike for Peace rally in New York, in the early days of November 1963. After speaking at the meeting held in the National Baptist Church, King joined the march from Central Park to the United Nations Headquarters. The march was timed to celebrate the group's second anniversary and celebrated the successful completion of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Coretta and Martin learned of John F. Kennedy's assassination when reports initially indicated he had only been seriously wounded. King joined her husband upstairs and watched Walter Cronkite announce the president's death. King sat with her visibly shaken husband following the confirmation.

FBI tapes

The FBI planned to mail tapes of her husband's alleged affairs to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office since surveillance revealed that Coretta opened her husband's mail when he was traveling. The FBI learned that King would be out of office by the time the tapes were mailed and that his wife would be the one to open it. J. Edgar Hoover even advised to mail "it from a southern state." Coretta sorted the tapes with the rest of the mail, listened to them, and immediately called her husband, "giving the Bureau a great deal of pleasure with the tone and tenor of her reactions." King played the tape in her presence, along with Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery. Publicly, Mrs. King would say "I couldn't make much out of it, it was just a lot of mumbo jumbo." The tapes were part of a larger attempt by J. Edgar Hoover to denounce King by revelations in his personal life.

Johnson presidency

Most prominently, perhaps, she worked hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King spoke with Malcolm X days before his assassination. Malcolm X told her that he was not in Alabama to make trouble for her husband, but instead to make white people have more appreciation for King's protests, seeing his alternative. On March 26, 1965, King's father joined her and her husband for a march that would later end in Montgomery. Her father "caught a glimpse of America's true potential" and for the called it "the greatest day in the whole history of America" after seeing chanting for his daughter's husband by both Caucasians and African-Americans.

Coretta Scott King criticized the sexism of the Civil Rights Movement in January 1966 in New Lady magazine, saying in part, "Not enough attention has been focused on the roles played by women in the struggle. By and large, men have formed the leadership in the civil rights struggle but...women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement." Martin Luther King, Jr. himself limited Coretta's role in the movement, and expected her to be a housewife. King participated in a Women Strike for Peace protest in January 1968, at the capital of Washington, D.C. with over five thousand women. In honor of the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, the group was called the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. Coretta co-chaired the Congress of Women conference with Pearl Willen and Mary Clarke.

Assassination of husband

Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. She learned of the shooting after being called by Jesse Jackson when she returned from shopping with her eldest child Yolanda. King had difficulty settling her children with the news that their father was deceased. She received a large number of telegrams, including one from Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, which she regarded as the one that touched her the most.

In an effort to prepare her daughter Bernice, then only five years old, for the funeral, she tried to explain to her that the next time she saw her father he would be in a casket and would not be speaking. When asked by her son Dexter when his father would return, King lied and told him that his father had only been badly hurt. Senator Robert Kennedy ordered three more telephones to be installed in the King residence for King and her family to be able to answer the flood of calls they received and offered a plane to transport her to Memphis. Coretta spoke to Kennedy the day after the assassination and asked if he could persuade Jacqueline Kennedy to attend her husband's funeral with him.

Robert Kennedy promised her that he would help "any way" he could. King was told to not go ahead and agree to Kennedy's offer by Southern Christian Leadership Conference members, who told her about his presidential ambitions. She ignored the warnings and went along with his request. On April 5, 1968, King arrived in Memphis to retrieve her husband's body and decided that the casket should be kept open during the funeral with the hope that her children would realize upon seeing his body that he would not be coming home. Mrs. King called photographer Bob Fitch and asked for documentation to be done, having known him for years. On April 7, 1968, former Vice President Richard Nixon visited Mrs. King and recalled his first meeting with her husband in 1955. Nixon also went to Mrs. King's husband's funeral on April 9, 1968, but did not walk in the procession. Nixon believed participating in the procession would be "grandstanding."

On April 8, 1968, Mrs. King and her children headed a march with sanitation workers that her husband had planned to carry out before his death. After the marchers reached the staging area at the Civic Center Plaza in front of Memphis City Hall, onlookers proceeded to take pictures of King and her children but stopped when she addressed everyone at a microphone. She said that despite the Martin Luther King, Jr. being away from his children at times, "his children knew that Daddy loved them, and the time that he spent with them was well spent." Prior to Martin's funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy met with her. The two spent five minutes together and despite the short visit, Coretta called it comforting. King's parents arrived from Alabama. Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel came, the latter being embraced by Mrs. King. Mrs. King and her sister-in-law Christine King Farris tried to prepare the children for seeing Martin's body. With the end of the funeral service, Mrs. King led her children and mourners in a march from the church to Morehouse College, her late husband's alma mater.

Early widowhood

Two days after her husband's death, King spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church and made her first statement on his views since he had died. She said her husband told their children, "If a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live." She brought up his ideals and the fact that he may be dead, but concluded that "his spirit will never die." Not very long after the assassination, Coretta took his place at a peace rally in New York City. Using notes he had written before his death, King constructed her own speech. Coretta approached the African-American entertainer and activist Josephine Baker to take her husband's place as leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Baker declined after thinking it over, stating that her twelve adopted children (known as the "rainbow tribe") were "...too young to lose their mother". Shortly after that Mrs. King decided to take the helm of the movement herself.

Coretta Scott King eventually broadened her focus to include women's rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace, and various other causes. As early as December 1968, she called for women to "unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war", during a Solidarity Day speech. On April 27, 1968, King spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Central Park in place of her husband. King made it clear that there was no reason "why a nation as rich as ours should be blighted by poverty, disease and illiteracy." King used notes taken from her husband's pockets upon his death, which included the "Ten Commandments on Vietnam." On June 5, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. After he died the following day, Ethel Kennedy, who King had spoken to with her husband only two months earlier, was widowed. King flew to Los Angeles to comfort Ethel over Bobby's death. On June 8, 1968, while King was attending the late senator's funeral, the Justice Department made the announcement of James Earl Ray's arrest.

Not long after this, the King household was visited by Mike Wallace, who wanted to visit her and the rest of her family and see how they were fairing that coming Christmas. She introduced her family to Wallace and also expressed her belief that there would not be another Martin Luther King, Jr. because he comes around "once in a century" or "maybe once in a thousand years". She furthered that she believed her children needed her more than ever, and that there was hope for redemption in her husband's death. In January 1969, King and Bernita Bennette left for a trip to India. Before arriving in the country, the two stopped in Verona, Italy and King was awarded the Universal Love Award. King became the first non-Italian to receive the award. King traveled to London with her sister, sister-in-law, Bernita and several others to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral. Before, no woman had ever delivered a sermon at a regularly appointed service in the cathedral.

As a leader of the movement, Mrs. King founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She served as the center's president and CEO from its inception until she passed the reins of leadership to son Dexter Scott King. Removing herself from leadership, allowed her to focus on writing, public speaking and spend time with her parents.

She published her memoirs, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1969. President Richard Nixon was advised against visiting her on the first anniversary of his death, since it would "outrage" many people.

Coretta Scott King was also under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1968 until 1972. Her husband's activities had been monitored during his lifetime. Documents obtained by a Houston, Texas television station show that the FBI worried that Coretta Scott King would "tie the anti-Vietnam movement to the civil rights movement." The FBI studied her memoir and concluded that her "selfless, magnanimous, decorous attitude is belied by...[her] actual shrewd, calculating, businesslike activities." A spokesman for the King family said that they were aware of the surveillance, but had not realized how extensive it was.

Later life

Every year after the assassination of her husband in 1968, Coretta attended a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark his birthday on January 15. She fought for years to make it a national holiday. In 1972, she said that there should be at least one national holiday a year in tribute to an African-American man, "and, at this point, Martin is the best candidate we have." Murray M. Silver, an Atlanta attorney, made the appeal at the services on January 14, 1979. Coretta Scott King later confirmed that it was the "...best, most productive appeal ever..." Coretta Scott King was finally successful in this campaign in 1986, when Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

After the death of J. Edgar Hoover, King made no attempt to hide her bitterness towards him for his work against her husband in a long statement. Coretta Scott King attended the state funeral of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973, as a very close friend of the former president. On July 25, 1978, King held a press conference in defense of then-Ambassador Andrew Young and his controversial statement on political prisoners in American jails. On September 19, 1979, Mrs. King visited the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch to meet with Lady Bird Johnson. In 1979 and 1980 Dr. Noel Erskine and Mrs. King co-taught a class on "The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr." at the Candler School of Theology (Emory University). On September 29, 1980, King's signing as a commentator for CNN was announced by Ted Turner.

On August 26, 1983, King resented endorsing Jesse Jackson for president, since she wanted to back up someone she believed could beat Reagan and dismissed her husband becoming a presidential candidate had he lived. On June 26, 1985, King was arrested with her daughter Bernice and son Martin Luther King III while taking part in an anti-apartheid protest at the Embassy of South Africa in Washington, D.C.

When President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, she was at the event. Reagan called her to personally apologize for a remark he made during a nationally televised conference, where he said we would know in "35 years" whether or not King was a communist sympathizer. Reagan clarified his remarks came from the fact that the papers had been sealed off until the year 2027. King accepted the apology and pointed out the Senate Select Committee on Assassinations had not found any basis to suggest her husband had communist ties. On February 9, 1987, eight civil rights activists were jailed for protesting the exclusion of African-Americans during the filming of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Cumming, Georgia. Oprah Winfrey tried to find out why the "community has not allowed black people to live there since 1912." King was outraged over the arrests, and wanted members of the group, "Coalition to End Fear and Intimidation in Forsyth County," to meet with Georgia Governor Joe Frank Harris to "seek a just resolution of the situation." On March 8, 1989, King lectured hundreds of students about the civil rights movement at the University of San Diego. King tried to not get involved in the controversy around the naming of the San Diego Convention Center after her husband. She maintained it was up to the "people within the community" and that people had tried to get her involved in with "those kind of local situations."

On January 17, 1993, King showed disdain for the U.S. missile attack on Iraq. In retaliation, she suggested peace protests. On February 16, 1993, King went to the FBI Headquarters and gave an approving address on Director William S. Sessions for having the FBI "turn its back on the abuses of the Hoover era." King commended Sessions for his "leadership in bringing women and minorities into the FBI and for being a true friend of civil rights." King admitted that she would not have accepted the arrangement had it not been for Sessions, the then-current director. On January 17, 1994, the day marking the 65th birthday of her husband, King said "No injustice, no matter how great, can excuse even a single act of violence against another human being." In January 1995, Qubilah Shabazz was indicted on charges of using telephones and crossing state lines in a plot to kill Louis Farrakhan. King defended her, saying at Riverside Church in Harlem that federal prosecutors targeted her to tarnish her father Malcolm X's legacy. During the fall of 1995, King chaired an attempt to register one million African-American female voters for the presidential election next year with fellow widows Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers and was saluted by her daughter Yolanda in a Washington hotel ballroom. On October 12, 1995, King spoke about the O. J. Simpson murder case, which she negated having a longterm affect on relations between races when speaking to an audience at Soka University in Calabasas. On January 24, 1996, King delivered a 40-minute speech at the Loyola University's Lake Shore campus in Rogers Park. She called for everyone to "pick up the torch of freedom and lead America towards another great revolution." On June 1, 1997, Betty Shabazz suffered extensive and life-threatening burns after her grandson Malcolm Shabazz started a fire in their home. In response to the hospitalization of her longtime friend, Mrs. King donated $5,000 to a rehabilitation fund for her. Shabazz died on June 23, 1997, three weeks after being burned.

During the 1990s, King was subject to multiple break-ins and encountered Lyndon Fitzgerald Pace, a man who admitted killing women in the area. He broke in the house in the middle of the night and found Coretta while she was sitting in her bed. After nearly eight years of staying in the home following the encounter, King moved to a condominium unit which had also been the home, albeit part-time, for singers Elton John and Janet Jackson. In 1999, the King family finally succeeded in getting a jury verdict saying her husband was the victim of a murder conspiracy after suing Loyd Jowers, who claimed six years prior to having paid someone other than James Earl Ray to kill her husband. On April 4, 2000, King visited her husband's grave with her sons, daughter Bernice and sister-in-law. In regards to plans to construct a monument for her husband in Washington, D.C., King said it would "complete a group of memorials in the nation's capital honoring democracy's greatest leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and now Martin Luther King, Jr." She became a vegan in the last 10 years of her life.

Opposition to apartheid

During the 1980s, Coretta Scott King reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington, D.C. that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies.

King had a 10-day trip to South Africa in September 1986. On September 9, 1986, she cancelled meeting President P. W. Botha and Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The next day, she met with Allan Boesak. The UDF leadership, Boesak and Winnie Mandela had threatened avoiding meeting King if she met with Botha and Buthelezi. She also met with Mandela that day, and called it "one of the greatest and most meaningful moments of my life." Mandela's husband was still being imprisoned in Pollsmoor Prison after being transferred from Robben Island in 1982. Prior to leaving the United States for the meeting, King drew comparisons between the civil rights movement and Mandela's case. Upon her return to the United States, she urged Reagan to approve economic sanctions against South Africa.

Peacemaking

Coretta Scott King was a long-time advocate for world peace. Author Michael Eric Dyson has called her "an earlier and more devoted pacifist than her husband." Although Mrs. King would object to the term "pacifism"; she was an advocate of non-violent direct action to achieve social change. In 1957, Mrs. King was one of the founders of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (now called Peace Action), and she spoke in San Francisco while her husband spoke in New York at the major anti-Vietnam war march on April 15, 1967 organized by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Mrs. King was vocal in her opposition to capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

LGBT equality

Corretta Scott King was an early supporter in the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights. In August, 1983 in Washington, DC she urged the amendment of the Civil Rights Act to include gays and lesbians as Protected class.

In response to the Supreme Court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that there was no constitutional right to engage in consensual sodomy, King's longtime friend, Winston Johnson of Atlanta, came out to her and was instrumental in arranging King as the featured speaker at the September 27, 1986 New York Gala of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. As reported in the New York Native King stated that she was there to express her solidarity with the gay and lesbian movement. She applauded gays and lesbians as having "always been a part of the civil rights movement."

On April 1, 1998 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Mrs. King called on the civil rights community to join in the struggle against homophobia and anti-gay bias. "Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood", she stated. "This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."

In a speech in November 2003 at the opening session of the 13th annual Creating Change Conference, organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Coretta Scott King made her now famous appeal linking the Civil Rights Movement to LGBT rights: "I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."

Coretta Scott King's support of LGBT rights was strongly criticized by some black pastors. She called her critics "misinformed" and said that Martin Luther King's message to the world was one of equality and inclusion.

In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African-American community.{{}}

On March 23, 2004, she told an audience at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, New Jersey, that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue. She denounced a proposed amendment advanced by President George W. Bush to the United States Constitution that would ban equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. In her speech King also criticized a group of black pastors in her home state of Georgia for backing a bill to amend that state's constitution to block gay and lesbian couples from marrying. Scott King is quoted as saying "Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage."

The King Center

Established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King, The King Center is the official memorial dedicated to the advancement of the legacy and ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of a nonviolent movement for justice, equality and peace. Two days after her husband's funeral, King began planning $15 million for funding the memorial. She handed the reins as CEO and president of the King Center down to her son, Dexter Scott King, who still runs the center today. The Kings initially had difficulty gathering the papers since they were in different locations, including colleges he attended and archives. King had a group of supporters begin gathering her husband's papers in 1967, the year before his death. After raising funds from a private sector and the government, she financed the building of the complex in 1981.

In 1984, she came under criticism by Hosea Williams, one of Martin's earliest followers, for having used the King Center to promote "authentic material" on her husband's dreams and ideals, and disqualified the merchandise as an attempt to exploit her husband. She sanctioned the kit, which contained a wall poster, five photographs of King and his family, a cassette of the I Have a Dream speech, a booklet of tips on how to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and five postcards with quotations from King himself. She believed it to be the authentic way to celebrate the holiday honoring her husband, and denied Hosea's claims.

King sued her husband's alma mater of Boston University over who would keep over 83,000 documents in December 1987, and said the documents belonged with the King archives. However, her husband was held to his word by the university; he had stated after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 that his papers would be kept at the college. Coretta's lawyers argued that the statement was not binding and mentioned that King had not left a will at the time of his death. King testified that President of Boston University John R. Silber in a 1985 meeting demanded that she send the university all of her husband's documents instead of the other way around. King released the statement, "Dr. King wanted the south to be the repository of the bulk of his papers. Now that the King Center library and archives are complete and have one of the finest civil-rights collections in all the world, it is time for the papers to be returned home."

On January 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush laid a wreath at the tomb of her husband and met with and was greeted by Mrs. King at the center. King praised Bush's support for the holiday, and joined hands with him at the end of a ceremony and sang "We Shall Overcome." On May 6, 1993, a court rejected her claims to the papers after finding that a July 16, 1964 letter King's husband wrote to the institute had constituted a binding charitable pledge to the university and outright stating that Martin Luther King retained ownership of his papers until giving them to the university as gifts or his death. King however, said her husband had changed his mind about allowing Boston University to keep the papers. After her son Dexter took over as the president of the King Center for the second time in 1994, King was given more time to write, address issues and spend time with her parents.

Illness and death

By the end of her 77th year, Coretta began experiencing health problems. Her husband's former secretary, Dora McDonald, assisted her part-time in this period. Hospitalized in April 2005, a month after speaking in Selma at the 40th anniversary of the Selma Voting Rights Movement, she was diagnosed with a heart condition and was discharged on her 78th and final birthday. Later, she suffered several small strokes. On August 16, 2005, she was hospitalized after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack. Initially, she was unable to speak or move her right side. King's daughter Bernice reported that she had been able to move her leg on Sunday, August 21 while her other daughter and oldest child Yolanda asserted that the family expected her to fully recover. She was released from Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta on September 22, 2005, after regaining some of her speech and continued physiotherapy at home. Due to continuing health problems, Mrs. King cancelled a number of speaking and traveling engagements throughout the remainder of 2005. On January 14, 2006, Coretta made her last public appearance in Atlanta at a dinner honoring her husband's memory. On January 26, 2006, King checked into a rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico under a different name. Doctors did not learn her real identity until her medical records arrived the next day, and did not begin treatment due to her condition.

Coretta Scott King died on the late evening of January 30, 2006, at the rehabilitation center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, In the Oasis Hospital where she was undergoing holistic therapy for her stroke and advanced stage ovarian cancer. The main cause of her death is believed to be respiratory failure due to complications from ovarian cancer. The clinic at which she died was called the Hospital Santa Monica, but was licensed as Clinica Santo Tomas. After reports indicated that it was not legally licensed to "perform surgery, take X-rays, perform laboratory work or run an internal pharmacy, all of which it was doing," as well as reports of it being operated by highly controversial medical figure Kurt Donsbach, it was shut down by medical commissioner Dr. Francisco Versa. King's body was flown from Mexico to Atlanta on February 1, 2006.

King's eight-hour funeral at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia was held on February 7, 2006. Bernice King did her eulogy. U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter attended, as did their wives, with the exception of former First Lady Barbara Bush who had a previous engagement. The Ford family was absent due to the illness of President Ford (who himself died later that year). Senator and future President Barack Obama, among other elected officials, attended the televised service.

President Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery delivered funeral orations, and were critical of the Iraq War and the wiretapping of the Kings. Mrs. King was temporarily laid in a mausoleum on the grounds of the King Center until a permanent place next to her husband's remains could be built. She had expressed to family members and others that she wanted her remains to lie next to her husband's at the King Center. On November 20, 2006, the new mausoleum containing the bodies of both Dr. and Mrs. King was unveiled in front of friends and family. The mausoleum is the third resting place of Martin Luther King, and the second of Mrs. King.

Family life

Martin often called Coretta "Corrie," even when the two were still only dating. The FBI captured a dispute between the couple in the middle of 1964, where the two both blamed each other for making the Civil Rights Movement even more difficult. Martin confessed in a 1965 sermon of his secretary having to remind him of his wife's birthday and the couple's wedding anniversary. For a time, many accompanying her husband would usually hear Coretta argue with him in telephone conversations. King resented her husband whenever he failed to call her about the children while he was away, and learned of his plans to not include her in formal visits, such as the White House. However, when King failed to meet to his own standards by missing a plane and fell into a level of despair, Coretta told her husband over the phone that "I believe in you, if that means anything." Author Ron Ramdin wrote "King faced many new and trying moments, his refuge was home and closeness to Coretta, whose calm and soothing voice whenever she sang, gave him renewed strength. She was the rock upon which his marriage and civil rights leadership, especially at this time of crisis, was founded." After she succeeded in getting Martin Luther King, Jr. Day made a federal holiday, King said her husband's dream was "for people of all religions, all socio-economic levels and all cultures to create a world community free from violence, poverty, racism and war so that they could live together in what he called the beloved community or his world house concept."

King considered raising children in a society that discriminated against them serious, and spoke against her husband whenever the two disagreed on financial needs of their family. The Kings had four children; Yolanda, Martin III, Dexter and Bernice. All four children later followed in their parents' footsteps as civil rights activists. King thought she raised them to be proud of the color of their skin, until being asked by her daughter Yolanda why "white people are pretty and Negroes are ugly?" Her daughter Bernice referred to her as "My favorite person." Years after King's death, Bernice would say her mother "spearheaded the effort to establish the King Center in Atlanta as the official living memorial for Martin Luther King Jr., and then went on to champion a national holiday commemorating our father's birthday, and a host of other efforts; and so in many respects she paved the way and made it possible for the most hated man in America in 1968 to now being one of the most revered and loved men in the world." Dexter Scott King's resigning four months after becoming president of the King Center has often been attributed to differences with his mother. Dexter's work saw a reduction of workers from 70 to 14, and also removed a child care center his mother had founded.

Lawsuits

The King family has mostly been criticized for their handling of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s estate, both while Coretta was alive and after her death. The King family sued a California auction in 1992, the family's attorneys filed claims of stolen property against Superior Galleries in Los Angeles Superior Court for the document's return. The King family additionally sued the auction house for punitive damages. In 1994, USA Today paid the family $10,000 in attorney's fees and court costs and also a $1,700 licensing fee for using the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from them. CBS was sued by the King estate for copyright infringement in November 1996. The network marketed a tape containing excerpts of the "I Have a Dream" speech. CBS had filmed the speech when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered it in 1963 and did not pay the family a licensing fee.

On April 8, 1998, Mrs. King met with Attorney General Janet Reno as requested by President Bill Clinton. Their meeting took place at the Justice Department four days after the thirtieth anniversary of her husband's death. On July 29, 1998, Mrs. King and her son Dexter met with Justice Department officials. The following day, Associate Attorney General Raymond Fisher told reporters "We discussed with them orally what kind of process we would follow to see if that meets their concerns. And we think it should, but they're thinking about it." On October 2, 1998, the King family filed a suit against Loyd Jowers after he stated publicly he had been paid to hire an assassin to kill Martin Luther King. Mrs. King's son Dexter met with Jowers, and the family contended that the shot that killed Mrs. King's husband came from behind a dense bushy area behind Jim's Grill. The shooter was identified by James Earl Ray's lawyers as Earl Clark, a police officer at the time of King's death, who had been dead for several years before the trial and lawsuits emerged. Jowers himself refused to identify the man he claimed kill Martin Luther King, as a favor to who he confirmed as the deceased killer with alleged ties to organized crimes. The King lawsuit sought unspecified damages from Jowers and other "unknown coconspirators." On November 16, 1999, Mrs. King testified that she hoped the truth would be brought about, regarding the assassination of her husband. Mrs. King believed that while Ray might have had a role in her husband's death, she did not believe he was the one to "really, actually kill him." She was the first to testify of her family, and indicated that they all believed Ray did not act alone. It was at this time that King called for President Bill Clinton to establish a national commission to investigate the assassination, as she believed "such a commission could make a major contribution to interracial healing and reconciliation in America."

Legacy

Coretta was viewed during her lifetime and posthumously as having striven to preserve her husband's legacy. The King Center, which she created the year of his assassination, allowed her husband's tomb to be memorialized. King was buried with her husband after her death, on February 7, 2006. King "fought to preserve his legacy" and her construction of the King Center is said to have aided in her efforts.

King has been linked and associated with Jacqueline Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, as the three all lost their husbands to assassinations. The three were together when Coretta flew to Los Angeles after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to be with Ethel and shared "colorblind compassion." She has also been compared to Michelle Obama, the first African-American First Lady of the United States.

She is seen as being primarily responsible for the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The holiday is now observed in all fifty states, and has been since 2000. The first observance of the holiday after her death was commemorated with speeches, visits to the couple's tomb and the opening of a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s papers. Her sister-in-law Christine King Farris said "It is in her memory and her honor that we must carry this program on. This is as she would have it."

Portrayals in film

Cicely Tyson, in the 1978 television miniseries King

Angela Bassett, in the 2013 television movie Betty and Coretta

Carmen Ejogo played Coretta King in both the 2001 HBO film Boycott and the 2014 film Selma.

Recognition and tributes

Coretta Scott King was the recipient of various honors and tributes both before and after her death. She received honorary degrees from many institutions, including Princeton University, Duke University, and Bates College. She was honored by both of her alma maters in 2004, receiving a Horace Mann Award from Antioch College and an Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory of Music.

In 1970, the American Library Association began awarding a medal named for Coretta Scott King to outstanding African-American writers and illustrators of children's literature.

In 1978, Women's Way awarded King with their first Lucretia Mott Award for showing a dedication to the advancement of women and justice similar to Lucretia Mott's.

Many individuals and organizations paid tribute to Scott King following her death, including U.S. President George W. Bush, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Black Justice Coalition, her alma mater Antioch College.

In 1983 she received the Four Freedom Award for the Freedom of Worship. In 1987 she received a Candace Award for Distinguished Service from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.

In 1997, Coretta Scott King was the recipient of the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.

In 2004, Coretta Scott King was awarded the prestigious Gandhi Peace Prize by the Government of India.

In 2006, the Jewish National Fund, the organization that works to plant trees in Israel, announced the creation of the Coretta Scott King forest in the Galilee region of Northern Israel, with the purpose of "perpetuating her memory of equality and peace", as well as the work of her husband. When she learned about this plan, King wrote to Israel's parliament:

"On April 3, 1968, just before he was killed, Martin delivered his last public address. In it he spoke of the visit he and I made to Israel. Moreover, he spoke to us about his vision of the Promised Land, a land of justice and equality, brotherhood and peace. Martin dedicated his life to the goals of peace and unity among all peoples, and perhaps nowhere in the world is there a greater appreciation of the desirability and necessity of peace than in Israel."

In 2007, The Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy (CSKYWLA) was opened in Atlanta, Georgia. At its inception, the school served girls in grade 6 with plans for expansion to grade 12 by 2014. CSKYWLA is a public school in the Atlanta Public Schools system. Among the staff and students, the acronym for the school's name, CSKYWLA (pronounced "see-skee-WAH-lah"), has been coined as a protologism to which this definition has given – "to be empowered by scholarship, non-violence, and social change." The school is currently under the leadership of Dione Simon (Principal). There Is Also A High School With A Graduating Class Next Year. The High School Is Currently Under The Leadership Of Termerion McCrary Lakes. That year was also the first observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day following her death, and she was honored.

Super Bowl XL was dedicated to King and Rosa Parks. Both were memorialized with a moment of silence during the pregame ceremonies. The children of both Parks and King then helped Tom Brady with the ceremonial coin toss. In addition two choirs representing the states of Georgia (King's home state) and Alabama (Park's home state) accompanied Dr. John, Aretha Franklin and Aaron Neville in the singing of the National Anthem.

She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 2009.

Congressional resolutions

Upon the news of her death, moments of reflection, remembrance, and mourning began around the world. In the United States Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist presented Senate Resolution 362 on behalf of all U.S. Senators, with the afternoon hours filled with respectful tributes throughout the U.S. Capitol.

On August 31, 2006, following a moment of silence in memoriam to the death of Coretta Scott King, the United States House of Representatives presented House Resolution 655 in honor of her legacy. In an unusual action, the resolution included a grace period of five days in which further comments could be added to it.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 5 months ago

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David Smith at The Guardian:

Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, has endorsed the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in the US presidential election. Gabbard, who served in the military in Iraq, ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2020. She quit the party two years later and has become a fixture at conservative conferences and in rightwing media. Addressing a National Guard Association conference in Detroit, Michigan, where Trump was speaking, Gabbard said: “This administration has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before. “This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House, where he can once again serve us as our commander-in-chief. Because I am confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress and is a former vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, accused the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, of retaliating against political opponents, undermining civil liberties and weaponising America’s institutions against both Trump and herself. “We as Americans must stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power,” she added. Gabbard’s announcement comes a day after Robert F Kennedy Jr, scion of a Democratic dynasty, suspended his own White House bid and threw his weight behind Trump. Elon Musk, who describes himself as “historically a moderate Democrat”, is also backing the former president.

[...] Trump, who has been portraying Harris as a leftwing extremist, told the gathering on Monday: “This fight is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. This is a fight between communism and freedom. “It’s a very serious fight. That’s why millions of traditional Democrats, including FDR Democrats, JFK Democrats, independents and old-fashioned liberals are joining our movement. Our poll numbers are great.”

Former Democrat and Assad/Kremlin shill Tulsi Gabbard endorses Donald Trump, following the lead of RFK Jr.