Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. - The Dream Reborn

credit - http://www.summit.mccsc.edu/

It was just after dinner time, around 7 o'clock in the evening, forty years ago today, that a peacemaker and rights advocate was forever silenced. Though more commonly credited for the eruption of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Dr. King was a Human Rights Advocate. He championed the cause of the oppressed, economically, socially, and politically disenfranchised. In fact, he was refining his advocacy focus in 1968 and had embarked upon the Poor People's Campaign. His advocacy visit in Memphis was apart of that campaign.

Now it is a new day, a new millennium, in fact. But there are still poor people and that campaign needs rekindling. An organization, called Green For All, has re-ignited Dr. King's torch of justice and advocacy - for both people and the environment - The Green Collar Jobs Campaign! There is a conference in Memphis, TN, this weekend, the commemorative weekend of Dr. King's assassination, to celebrate his life and legacy of advocacy.

Right now, there are no other issues that are more paramount to this world than the environment. But for whatever reason, the Black Community is largely absent and the traditional Black Advocacy organizations are silent. That is a shame, because the state of the environment affects us all and we have a responsibility to sustain it and be sustained by it.

“In an ecological age, it’s not like the environment is separate from Black people. We have this fantasy that somehow the white people are supposed to deal with the environment and the polar bears and the whales, and I guess we live on some other planet. But the reality is that when the environment is poisoned, our children get poisoned first. So we should be the foremost environmentalists." - Van Jones, Founder of the Green For All founding president of Green For All talking about The Dream Reborn Conference, hosted by Green for All in Memphis, TN, at the Cook Convention Center April 4-6, 2008. Excerpt taken from an article in the Tri-State Defender.

The Dream Reborn Conference will host over 1000 people coming together to celebrate MLK's extraordinary life and present positive solutions from today's generation of visionary leaders to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.