Oahu
Maui
HSTA Maui Chapter
invites you to join
The African Americans on Maui Association
Walking March & Festival
200 High Street, Wailuku
“Stone of Hope” Monument
9:00 a.m. Monday, January 20, 2014
March down Main Street to the Wailuku Banyan Tree Park
Please stay to enjoy speakers, food,
vendors, and unity following the event.
www.africanamericansonmaui.com
2013-11-09 11:24 AM
(Original post November 9, 2013 11:24 AM)
January 20, 2014 - MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY PARADE SCHEDULED FOR OAHU
HSTA honors the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr. by participating in the Martin Luther King Day parade on January 20, 2014. We will meet at the Magic Island parking lot at Ala Moana Beach Park and walk to Kapiolani Park near the Waikiki Shell. Look for the yellow school bus shuttles which will be available to take you from 7 a.m. from the Waikiki Shell to Magic Island. Join us on our trolley or march with us. Friends, family and colleagues are welcome. Wear any HSTA shirt and join us on a march of solidarity for social justice and civil rights.
~ HSTA Youth Human & Civil Rights Committee
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and others wore leis as they marched from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965.
Photo: WFA/Associated Press, via the Guardian
Hawaii Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition
http://mlk-hawaii.com/home/
Lesson Plans, Activity Ideas & Other Resources for Teaching MLK Day
Help students put in perspective Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s life, his impact on the Civil Rights Movement, and his significance to American culture and history.
Resources For:
Grades K-5
Grades 6-8
Grades 9-12
“Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Morehouse College student newspaper, 1947
Morehouse College: King Collection (Updated 1/1/14)
http://www.morehouse.edu/kingcollection/index.php
(Note: This link takes users away from the HSTA Web site and sometimes takes a long period of time to respond. Additional information from Morehouse is available below:)
Morehouse College King Collection - YouTube Resources
Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
http://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm
Ebenezer Baptist Church
http://www.nps.gov/malu/planyourvisit/ebenezer_baptist_church.htm
http://www.historicebenezer.org/
Martin Luther King, Jr. arriving in Honolulu
Dr. Martin Luther King visited the newly formed Hawaii State Legislature on September 17, 1959. The focus of his speech was on race relations in the nation as well his observations on Hawaii’s accomplishments at the time. Additionally, he also spoke at the forum committee of the Student Senate of the University of Hawaii and preached at Hawaii’s Central Union United Church of Christ.
The following remarks were made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Thursday, September 17, 1959
at the Hawaii House of Representatives 1959 First Special Session:
“Mr. Speaker, distinguished members of the House of Representatives of this great new state in our Union, ladies and gentlemen:
It is certainly a delightful privilege and pleasure for me to have this great opportunity and, I shall say, it is a great honor to come before you today and to have the privilege of saying just a few words to you about some of the pressing problems confronting our nation and our world.
I come to you with a great deal of appreciation and great feeling of appreciation, I should say, for what has been accomplished in this beautiful setting and in this beautiful state of our Union. As I think of the struggle that we are engaged in in the South land, 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.
People ask me from time to time as I travel across the country and over the world whether there has been any real progress in the area of race relations, and I always answer it by saying that there are three basic attitudes that one can take toward the question of progress in the area of race relations. One can take the attitude of extreme optimism. The extreme optimist would contend that we have come a long, long way in the area of race relations, and he would point proudly to the strides that have been made in the area of civil rights in the last few decades. And, from this, he would conclude that the problem is just about solved now and that we can sit down comfortably by the wayside and wait on the coming of the inevitable.
And then segregation is still with us. Although we have seen the walls gradually crumble, it is still with us. I imply that figuratively speaking, that Old Man Segregation is on his death bed, but you know history has proven that social systems have a great last-minute breathing power, and the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive, and this is exactly what we see today. So segregation is still with us. We are confronted in the South in its glaring and conspicuous forms, and we are confronted in almost every other section of the nation in its hidden and subtle forms. But if democracy is to live, segregation must die. Segregation is a cancer in the body politic which must be removed before our democratic health can be realized. In a real sense, the shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of an anemic democracy. If we are to survive, if we are to stand as a force in the world, if we are to maintain our prestige, we must solve this problem because people are looking over to America.
Just two years ago I traveled all over Africa and talked with leaders from that great continent. One of the things they said to me was this: No amount of extensive handouts and beautiful words would be substitutes for treating our brothers in the United States as first-class citizens and human beings. This came to me from mouth of Prime Minister Nkrumah of Ghana.
Just four months ago, I traveled throughout India and the Middle East and talked with many of the people and leaders of that great country and other people in the Middle East, and these are the things they talked about: That we must solve this problem if we are to stand and to maintain our prestige. And I can remember very vividly meeting people all over Europe and in the Middle East and in the Far East, and even though many of them could not speak English, they knew how to say ‘Little Rock.’
And these are the things that we must be concerned about – we must be concerned about because we love America and we are out to free not only the Negro. This is not our struggle today to free 17,000,000 Negroes. It’s bigger than that. We are seeking to free the soul of America. Segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are to free all men, all races and all groups. This is our responsibility and this is our challenge, and we look to this great new state in our Union as the example and as the inspiration. As we move on in this realm, let us move on with the faith that this problem can be solved, and that it will be solved, believing firmly that all reality hinges on moral foundations, and we are struggling for what is right, and we are destined to win.
We have come a long, long way. We have a long, long way to go. I close, if you will permit me, by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher. He didn’t quite have his grammar right, but he uttered some words in the form of a prayer with great symbolic profundity and these are the works he said: ‘Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God, we ain’t what we was.’ Thank you.”
Coretta Scott King sat in Gov. John Waihee’s chair to deliver a speech after the signing of the bill that created a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday in Hawai’i. ADVERTISER LIBRARY PHOTO | June 7, 1988
Posted on: Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Coretta Scott King warmly remembered in Islands
By Gordon Y.K. Pang
Advertiser Staff Writer
Coretta Scott King first came to Honolulu in June 1987 in an effort to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday.
Hawai’i was then one of seven states that had not declared it a state holiday, following the establishment of the federal holiday in 1983.
Hawai’i, among the last three states to mark the holiday in honor of the fallen civil rights leader, held its first Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1989.
Faye Kennedy, first vice president of the Hawai’i branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said she and others began to fight for the holiday in 1986. Mrs. King’s visit included a talk to 1,000 people at Central Union Church and helped push the issue over the top, Kennedy said.
One of the arguments against a King holiday was that Hawai’i already had many paid holidays. As a solution, lawmakers got rid of the Discoverer’s Day holiday that was commemorated the second Monday of each October.
“I’m certain her appearance was one of the wonderful things that happened that helped get the holiday,” Kennedy said.
A year later, King returned to the state Capitol to witness then-Gov. John Waihee signing the holiday into law.
In her only meeting with King, Kennedy recalled that she was “gracious and very modest ... she spoke softly and was just an unpretentious person who appeared to be quite humble.”
Kennedy said one of the keys to getting the holiday approved was convincing Hawai’i lawmakers and the public that Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he led had become more than fighting for the rights of black Americans.
“It’s about all of us, especially the marginalized groups, helping each other,” Kennedy said.
Others in Hawai’i's civil rights community yesterday echoed that sentiment.
At the time of his death in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was beginning to shift his focus beyond the fight for black rights and toward a more universal call to help the oppressed. With her charismatic husband gone, Coretta Scott King had to carry on that fight.
Miles Jackson, a historian and librarian of black American history, said that too often, people mistake the Kings with fighting just for black civil rights.
“It was to liberate a lot of people,” said Jackson, who lived in Atlanta during the 1960s and was involved in the movement. “Particularly here in the Islands, they think that Martin Luther King Day is just for African Americans. That’s not true. It is a time for people to celebrate Martin Luther King regardless of their race, religion (or) creed.”
Alphonso Braggs, president of the NAACP’s Hawai’i branch, recalled how King led a march in Memphis just days after her husband’s assassination.
“She wasn’t just about civil rights,” Braggs said. “Like her husband, she also was concerned about human rights, human dignities, equalities and justices for all. Most recently, she had been a tireless advocate for the AIDS movement and bringing awareness to that.”
Eduardo Hernandez, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Honolulu, said the fight against discrimination continues. He noted that King said in a speech in 2000 that freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation “is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender or ethnic discrimination.
Patricia Anthony, president of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition, was born in Hawai’i and divided her time between here and North Carolina, but she spent her childhood summers in Atlanta with her uncle, a neighbor of the Kings.
Playing with the King children, Anthony said, she got to know Coretta Scott King as “a quiet, educated Southern lady.”
• Correction: It was Coretta Scott King who said: “Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender or ethnic discrimination.” The statement was incorrectly attributed in an earlier version of this story.
Queen Liliuokalani and Dr. King, January 2005
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition Hawaii
http://mlk-hawaii.com/book/2005_MLK_Book.pdf