NIN-HAI TSENG, Cox News
-Longtime associates of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. announced plans Wednesday to revitalize the civil rights leader’s dream of equality and racial harmony by organizing a global initiative promoting peace and combating racism.
“We will support anybody who is tired of the barbarism of war and the insanity of racism and the scourge of poverty that is at the root of all of it,” said the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, former director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Washington bureau.
Wednesday’s announcement marked the 45th anniversary of talks by King and other leaders in New York City that led to the March on Washington.
It was at the 1963 march, which drew a quarter of a million people, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
Former leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including the Rev. Joseph Lowery, signed a declaration launching the initiative. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a close associate of King’s, and Fred Shuttlesworth, who tested Alabama’s segregation laws, also signed the document.
The leaders said the group would meet July 9 in Washington to discuss the initiative.
Organizers say the declaration signed Wednesday would be presented to prominent black leaders, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
Lowery, who helped organize black advocacy groups to protest apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1970s, said that in their broad support for Obama, “young people are transcending race, they’re transcending ethnicity.”
“They are aware of its presence,” Lowery said, “but they are ignoring it in terms of their coming together to allow common goals.”
