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KamaAina

(78,249 posts)
Thu Jan 22, 2015, 04:48 PM Jan 2015

Why did Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wear a lei on his famous 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery?

http://www.allhawaiinews.com/2015/01/why-did-rev-martin-luther-king-jr-wear.html

Ever wonder why the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders on that famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. wore lei? Turns out King had special ties to the Aloha State, and to the family of U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii.

It's altogether fitting that the Hawaii Legislature opens its annual session this week as the state and the rest of the nation commemorate what would have been King's 83rd birthday. King, in his 1959 address to a special session of the Hawaii Legislature, praised Hawaii for its ethnic diversity.

"We look to you for inspiration and as a noble example, where you have already accomplished in the area of racial harmony and racial justice, what we are struggling to accomplish in other sections of the country, and you can never know what it means to those of us caught for the moment in the tragic and often dark midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, to come to a place where we see the glowing daybreak of freedom and dignity and racial justice," King said in his address.

Five years after those words, King carried a bit of Hawaii to Alabama. That five-day, 54-mile march from Selma, where an Alabama state trooper had shot and killed church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson, to the state capital, helped bring King to the forefront of the nation's imagination, spurring the cause of nonviolent protest that would be picked up and championed by an entire generation, fomenting the hope of equality for all mankind.


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Why did Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wear a lei on his famous 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery? (Original Post) KamaAina Jan 2015 OP
Maybe he knew Obama's mother and was in on the birth certificate scam Politicalboi Jan 2015 #1
DUzy! KamaAina Jan 2015 #2
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