Tag: poverty

Black History Fun Fact Friday – 4 Little Known Fun Facts About Dr. King

Born Michael King

In Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born Michael King, the second of three children born to Micheal King Sr., and Alberta Christine on January 15, 1929. Micheal Jr. was born and raised on 501 Auburn Avenue in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the country’s most prominent and prosperous African Americans and now part of the MLK Birth Home Tour of the National Historical Park. The house was purchased by King’s grandfather Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, Alberta’s father, in 1909.

Michael King Sr. changed his and his son’s name to Martin after Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, which led to a split with the Catholic Church. He did this after touring Germany and witnessing the beginnings of Nazi Germany while in Berlin (Adolf Hitler had become chancellor the year before King’s arrival), according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford.

The Poor People’s Campaign

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., displays the poster to be used during his Poor People’s Campaign  spring and summer, March 4, 1968. King said the campaign would begin April 22 but he was murdered April 4th (AP Photo/Horace Cort)

Dr. King founded a program called The Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that “sought to bring a multiracial coalition of religious leaders, workers, and the poor together to fight poverty in a way that intentionally centered the voices of the marginalized.” Officially commencing in December 1967, Dr. King wanted to bring together poor people from across the country to demand better jobs, homes, education, and better lives. The purpose behind the campaign was to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life.”

“If you are, let’s say, from rural Mississippi and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs. And in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ultimately, King put together a plan that he thought would help solve poverty so that every American had a guaranteed income. Dr. King set his program to begin on April 22 but was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Fought for Better Schools for Children in the Cabrini Green Projects

Civil Rights Museum, Lorraine Motel, 2018.

In 1966, Dr. King moved into an apartment on Chicago’s West Side as part of the Freedom Movement. He was less interested in Civil Rights by then and more interested in Human Rights, including fair housing in Northern cities. Chicago in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s was a segregated city plagued with a system of redlining that prevented blacks from purchasing property in their own communities. Not only was the rent high, but run-down apartments were divided into Kitchenettes that split six-family apartments in half, so they became one-room apartments.

“The Kitchenette is our prison, our death sentence without a trial, the new form of mob violence that assaults not only the lone individual but all of us in its ceaseless attacks.” – Richard Wright.

The Projects were the answer to the slums but did not fare much better. People eventually abandoned public housing for the suburbs, offended that blacks were “being treated as whites.” Newspapers and Ads boasted Blacks and Italians living side by side, happy and positive. The public did not have it. Riots broke out as whites pulled blacks out of their cars, beating them. Middle-class blacks were forced out as the screening process got more and more relaxed. Eventually, they put up gates, which made residents feel imprisoned. The once “promised land,” that was the newly established public housing program, became just another ghetto. Black schools also suffered.

One elementary school was overcrowded, and King fought with residents to get a racist teacher fired. “The people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate,” he said after being stoned by angry white residents in the then all-white Marquette Park on the city’s Southwest Side. When parents were in their third day of a planned strike, Dr. King met with them, saying, “Should you in any way be persecuted or prosecuted for attempting to seek the best education possible for your children, I can assure you that thousands of parents from all over the city will come to your aid and together we will join you in jail if necessary.”

Campaigned for Black Sanitation Workers in Memphis

Dr. King helped black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in March and April of 1968. He compared their struggle with the poor people’s campaign, saying, “A fight by capable, hard workers against dehumanization, discrimination and poverty wages in the richest country in the world.” The deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker brought the issue of sanitation workers into the public eye. These men were crushed to death by a trash compensation mechanism on a garbage truck that malfunctioned on February 1, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King was in Memphis for that strike when he was murdered at the Lorraine Motel.

The deaths of these men highlighted the dangerous conditions under which these men worked. The strike brought it to the attention of Civil Rights leaders like Dr. King, who “saw the Memphis strike and the workers’ demand for union rights as embodying the goals and values of his fledgling Poor People’s Campaign.”

More fun facts about King will be featured in the Black History Facts You Didn’t Learn in School book.

For now, be sure to check out other Black History Fun Facts on the page here.

My Memoir Writing Journey

What exactly am I working on now? A lot of things but mostly my memoir. Now that Keep Yourself Full is on its way out, I want to get this done and I will have to deter a lot of projects to do it. At least until I finish the first draft and then I can work on other stuff and just work on the memoir from there. (I will still revise The Stella Trilogy first and release my next collection of poetry).

This is the hardest writing job I’ve ever undertaken. I have deleted everything I ever sent my email list as a sneak peek two years ago (can’t believe I let you in on that *insert eye-ball roll*) and have started over. I am fifty pages and nine chapters into the first draft so it’s not so bad considering starting over. What I don’t want this memoir to be is an autobiography. I’ve always wanted to write an autobiography, but that’s before I learned the difference between the two.

I learned memoirs differ from autobiographies. Memoirs are popular because they center on one theme and read like novels, making them much more interesting than the chronological format of the autobiography.

Theme

One thing I am working on is not making this psychoanalytic if that’s the right word. While I’ve endured much trauma in my life, I don’t want this to be a dark history of my crazy. I don’t want this to be a therapy session. This is difficult because I’m not a sugarcoat type person and neither is my mother. I gotta keep it all the way real. I gotta be honest. How do I do this without going too far?

My title is “I Wasn’t Built to Break,” so my theme is to take all the things that have been obstacles and challenges in my life, that could have broken me physically, mentally, and emotionally, but didn’t. This means that I will not go into every single detail of my life but I will focus on certain significant events, starting with growing up in the Robert Taylor Projects.

Anyone who grew up in any of Chicago’s projects is a survivor in my eyes, a warrior. It meant they not only escaped the drugs, violence, poverty, neglect, and gangs, but they also escaped literal death. Perched above the high-risers of Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green, snipers (aka Gang Members) with high-powered rifles would sit on a top floor (in a vacant apartment) and shoot their rivals. These bullets though, often hit innocent bystanders, mostly children.

I remember my Uncle coming to school to get us early because the buildings were shooting, and we had to run to our building. When I say it was a Warzone, I mean that literally. And none of us project kids ever got counseling or therapy for the things we saw. Not even the classmates of the seven-year-old Dantrell Davis from Cabrini who was shot by a sniper on his way to school in 1992 in front of his mother, teachers, police officers, and classmates.

Historical

Writing a memoir is no easy task so my approach is to research and write this as if I am writing a historical novel. Since I enjoy writing Historical Fiction, I want to incorporate history into my testimony. Instead of focusing on my experiences only, I want to take us back into the politics of some of what was going on in the world I did not have knowledge of as a kid. There’s my world where I can only see what’s in front of me and around me and then there’s the world at large. How did the decisions of others affect me, one of 21,000 children growing up in what became known as one of the poorest urban communities in the United States, a concentration of poverty they called it?

I want to go into how the projects under the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) replaced the Chicago Slums, the discriminatory policies like redlining that kept blacks from purchasing homes in their own neighborhoods, the kitchenettes and one-room basements blacks lived in during the 30s, 40s and 50s, the beacon of hope the projects promised as a replacement, the mixed-community that was there (because whites and blacks both lived in the PJs!), the racial riots that never made the news, and the racist policies that caused many white families to move out of the projects and into the suburbs.

And what about the Plan for Transformation that demolished Public Housing and replaced them with a mixed-income community of condos and townhomes? What did this cultural mix mean for former public housing residents? And who was Robert Taylor? The black man on the board of CHA who opposed building the projects on the same land as the slums? The black man who wanted to spread the buildings out, so they fully integrated blacks throughout Chicago and who, after CHA refused, quit. I hope that if I do this, it will be a much enjoyable read.

I want to incorporate both history and personal testimony with the testimony supporting history. I remember for instance that whole “Homie the Clown” Scare of the early 90s. I remember that because I had nightmares of the clown coming into our apartment and chasing me around the couch. In 1991, rumors surfaced that a man who we called “Homie the Clown” was riding around in a van kidnapping and killing kids.

“Homey the Clown,” was the name of a character played by Damon Wayans on the early 90s sketch-comedy show In Living Color. The character was an angry black ex-con who carried a sock for knocking bad kids upside the head. His catchphrase was “Homey don’t play that.” Our “Homie the Clown” was allegedly dressed as a clown and went around kidnapping kids. Rumors said that he rode in a van and liked to stand next to mailboxes eating bananas.

This sounds silly now, but it was serious back then, just like the recent clown scares. We got let out of school early and children were afraid to walk by mailboxes. It also didn’t help that Stephen King’s IT had also just come out.

Community

It wasn’t all bad though so I want to talk about the close-knit community that existed there too that never made the news. Generations of families grew up together in what is rarely seen today. My mother’s friend, who lived next door, helped her to babysit. People watched one another children, shopped together, stepped up when someone was in need and shared food. We could go next door or downstairs to ask if someone had sugar or flour. We bartered services and passed along information about job openings or what was new at the Aid office and the candy lady was an entrepreneur. She used her food stamps to open a candy store back when you can get one piece of candy for every penny you had, better known as Penny Candy. People threw house parties and sleepovers.

Robert Taylor was not just a concentration of poverty. It was also a thriving community. When things were good, they were really good, and everyone was family. But you didn’t see this on the news. We were not all crack babies. We were not animals.

Appreciation

illustration_today_i_am_thankful1

One of my itty bitty’s (a nickname for the children I work with in the community) was upset to discover that their treat was not as exciting as those given to the other children. We had played a guessing game that utilized their spelling and vocabulary skills and they were now being rewarded as a job well done. I on the other hand, was not exactly prepared to end the lesson. For this reason I put the snacks in a box and blindly (without looking), chose each child’s snack. While some received potato chips and juice, others got things like cereal (no milk) and cheese crackers. Needless to say the one who got the cereal did not appreciate her inability to get the potato chips, and the one who received the crackers mentioned he did not eat cheese, and simply gave it back. They were more upset however at my unwillingness to give a different snack or to allow them to trade. The lesson here, as I explained, was Appreciation. Not always agreeing with what is received, but accepting it as a gift because it was given to you, even if you passed it on to someone else. I explained to Tommy (not his real name), that instead of giving the crackers back he could have given it to one of his brothers or sisters who was not present at the time. That led to the inspiration of today’s post.

 

How often do you appreciate the little things?

 

You don’t have to share in someone’s reason for being; don’t have to agree with the birds need to sing soulful melodies in the morning in fact, that just may irritate you. May make you abandon your sleep to shoo away the creature destroying your morning bliss. Or maybe the drunkard on the nearest street corner has asked for the last of your change for the last time. Maybe the blogger next door has stirred within you a fiery rage of disagreement, like the smell of dissatisfaction poured out in a bowl of incense, a useless sacrifice from your subscription, not exactly what you expected. But sometimes growing with people is about appreciating the little bit of good you may be able to extract from them for the sake of building up your own goodness.

 
As mentioned earlier, Tommy may not have seen any good in receiving a snack made up of what he did not eat (cheese), but seeing the good in the fact that someone had given him something, he could have accepted the snack as a form of appreciation even if he gave it to someone else. His acceptance would have then built up something good in himself, and may have then moved me to enough compassion to give him something else.

 

The Lesson:
Learn to appreciate what seems insignificant, and in a humble manner strive to grow with what seems poor.