Acappella - Lift Every Voice
Acappella - America
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Volunteer For Obama with Me
Volunteer For Obama with Me
If you support Barack Obama ,We need your HELP NOW!!!!!
We've gotten to where we are because people like you and me, in state after state, have reached out to friends and neighbors -- and even perfect strangers -- to talk about what's at stake in this election.
The results speak for themselves -- we've won more votes, more delegates, and more than twice as many contests as Senator Clinton.
We face an uphill battle, but all this weekend people are gathering at grassroots phonebank locations and in there homes to build on our momentum and make calls to potential Obama supporters in North Carolina and Indiana . Get together with other supporters to make calls or on your own at home .
This will help and be a very important activity.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/actioncenter
Our online phonebanking tool on My.BarackObama is available until 9 p.m. Eastern every night. Click here to get started:
http://my.barackobama.com/call
In more than forty contests so far, we've seen that one voice is often all it takes to bring someone new into this movement.
You can be that voice. I hope you'll get involved this
weekend.
http://my.barackobama.com/callNC
http://my. barackobama. com/page/content/nchome/
http://my. barackobama. com/page/content/inhome
No prior political experience is necessary.
The team will be here to make sure you have all the support and training you need to have an impact on our Get Out The Vote effort
I will be going to the Durham - Raleigh, North Carolina area April 26 and returning April 27,2008.
This campaign can only succeed if we take its future into our own hands.
Ronald G B White
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The rebellious son of a Baptist minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was hired by Trinity United Church of Christ in 1972 when he could find no Baptist church to take him. The congregation on 95th Street had recently adopted the motto "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian" and did not mind his fiery red Afro and black power agenda. Wright now leads the nation's largest UCC congregation. Members include hip-hop artist Common and Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. Obama based his keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic...
REV. JEREMIAH A. WRIGHT, JR.: Pastor inspires Obama's 'audacity'
By Manya A. Brachear | Tribune religion reporter
January 21, 2007
When he took over Trinity United Church of Christ in 1972, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was a maverick pastor with a wardrobe of dashikis and a militant message.
Six years later, he planted a "Free South Africa" sign on the lawn of his church and asked other local religious leaders to follow his lead.
None took him up on the invitation.
The sign stayed until the end of apartheid, --long enough to catch the eye of a young Barack Obama, who visited the church in 1985 as a community activist. Obama, was not a churchgoer at the time, but he found himself returning to the sanctuary of Trinity United. In Wright he had found both a spiritual mentor and a role model.
Wright, 65, is a straight-talking pragmatist who arrived in Chicago as an outsider and became an institution. He has built a congregation of 8,500, including the likes of Oprah Winfrey and hip-hop artist Common, by offering an alternative to socially conservative black churches that are, Wright believes, too closely tied to Chicago's political dynasties.
Obama, too, also came to the city as a young unknown. Emerging from relative obscurity with his win in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary race for a U.S. Senate seat, he found a growing audience by preaching the politics of social justice and common ground. He has encouraged Democrats to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of Americans. Now, he is positioning himself as a presidential candidate who can unify the American people.
Obama says that rather than advising him on strategy, Wright helps keep his priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated.
"What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice," Obama said. "He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."
The rebellious son of a Baptist minister, Wright was hired by Trinity United when he could find no Baptist church to take him. The congregation on 95th Street, then numbering just 87, had recently adopted the motto "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." They did not mind his fiery red Afro and black power agenda.
Wright has continued on an independent path ever since, often questioning the common sense of Scripture, objecting to mandatory prayer in schools and clashing with clergy who preach prosperity theology, a popular notion among black pastors that God will bestow wealth and success on believers.
In the process, he built a spiritual empire. The modest brown brick building that housed the church in the 1970s was converted into a day-care center when Trinity opened its new sanctuary in 1995 at 400 W. 95th St. Members run more than 80 ministries, including an outreach to gay and lesbian singles, --also unusual for a black church.
And though Wright now wears three-piece suits on occasion, but he still dons a dashiki most times he preaches. Obama has said he is particularly inspired by Wright's ability to draw followers from all walks of life--celebrities and welfare recipients, PhDs and GEDs. It is a gift the senator aspires to emulate.
Wright again bucked convention by announcing plans to retire in May 2008 and tapping Rev. Otis Moss III as his successor. Many black pastors do not surrender their pulpit even when they become too feeble to serve, said Rev. Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School who met Wright in the 1980s.
Wright's willingness to "surrender leadership" demonstrates a humility that sets him apart, Hopkins said.
"The black church is probably the only space in America where black men can have unquestioned authority," he said. "It's hard to give that up for a lot of black male pastors."
Wright said the decision was not hard difficult. "The church is built around the personality of Jesus, not Jeremiah Wright," he said.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Wright followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and enrolled at by attending Virginia Union University, with the intention of doing graduate work at the historically black seminary. But disenchanted by what he felt was an inadequate Christian response to the civil rights movement, he abruptly ended his pastoral pursuits and joined the U.S. Navy.
An encounter with a pastor as he loitered on some church steps reminded Wright of his calling. He eventually returned to Howard University to finish bachelor's and master's degrees in English with a focus on African spirituals. At the University of Chicago Divinity School, he earned another master's in the history of religions with a focus on Islam. He planned to earn a doctoral degree his Ph.D. and teach at a seminary.
But his calling to teach was interrupted by a call to action. Many black Christians were leaving the church for other religious traditions, including the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam, who taught that Christianity was a white man's religion imposed on them by slaveholders.
"They didn't know African-American history," Wright said. "They were leaving the churches by the boatloads ¡K The church seemed so disconnected from their struggle for dignity and humanity."
Wright set out to show young people how other major religions also participated in the slave trade, how many abolitionists were Christians and how Jesus' concern for the oppressed related to the struggles of the black community.
To do that, he needed a pulpit and found one at Trinity, which needed a leader to match its new motto and new attitude.
"Many of us who had grown up in very traditional denominations were all transformed by the civil rights movement and were beginning to question how our faith intersected with our actions," said longtime Trinity member Iva Carruthers, who is helping Wright launch a church grammar school.
Wright sought to build on the black theology of liberation introduced in 1968 by Rev. James Cone of New York, by emphasizing Africa's contribution to Christianity rather than that of mainstream white theologians.
"To show there is an independent form of thinking there about religion that stands on its own, that's really more life-giving than what you get from Europe," Cone said. "Black people who come from that approach have a very healthy understanding of who they are."
To bolster that pride, Wright takes members of his flock to different African nations every year. Wright also encourages youths in the congregation to attend historically black colleges and universities, sponsoring a scholarship fair each year.
The success of Trinity did not come without sacrifice.
"Growing up in the church was kind of bittersweet," said Wright's daughter Jeri, who developed a church publication into the nationally distributed Trumpet magazine. "That's when his daily life consisted of his service to God's people. I've always loved going to church and going to worship. At the same time I felt my church took my father from me."
She credits her mother, Janet, for helping her understand.
"It was my mother that taught us to separate the man from the ministry," his daughter said. "No matter what happened in our lives, she never wanted us to have any ill feelings toward the church or toward our father. `Yes, he is your father, but when he steps behind that sacred desk he is God's messenger, and never confuse the two.'ƒ|"
It was a harder lesson to live. Janet and Jeremiah Wright eventually divorced, --which the pastor describes as his greatest failure. He has since remarried and had another daughter, Jamila, and with his wife, Ramah, he sees a counselor regularly.
He hides none of this from his congregation, despite the persistent whispering since his divorce.
"He's not a hypocrite," Hopkins said. "You know what he says behind closed doors, he'll say in the pulpit."
"People expect him to be God. They expect him to be Jesus," said Jeri Wright said. "The reality is, he's human. He has the same hurt, the same pains, the same issues as those that come and sit under the sound of his voice every Sunday." That dose of reality is what keeps Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., known in the to hip-hop world as Common, coming back to Trinity.
"That's one of the greatest attributes I love about him," said Common, who grew up in the church. "He falls victim to the same things ¡K He brings balance to the pulpit. He didn't just create an image."
In his 1993 memoir "Dreams from My Father," Obama recounts in vivid detail his first meeting with Wright in 1985. The pastor warned the community activist that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church's radical reputation.
When Obama sought his own church community, he felt increasingly at home at Trinity. Before leaving for Harvard Law School in 1988, he responded to one of Wright's altar calls and declared a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Later he would base his 2004 keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention on a Wright sermon called "Audacity to Hope," --also the inspiration for Obama's second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope."
Though Wright and Obama do not often talk one-on-one often, the senator does check with his pastor before making any bold political moves.
Last fall, Obama approached Wright to broach the possibility of running for president. Wright cautioned Obama not to let politics change him, but he also encouraged Obama, win or lose.
Wright said, "Picture some kid who lives in Hyde Park or over in Ida B. Wells Homes or Washington Gardens, who will see Barack and say, `My God, I can be one day be that.' The amount of hope that it will give to kids who society has written off just in terms of them changing their concept of what is possible is going to be immeasurable for generations to come." ƒ| mbrachear@tribune.com
Monday, April 21, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Volunteer For Obama with Me
COME TO PENNSYLVANIA - VOLUNTEER FOR OBAMA WITH ME
You can do more than just help this campaign. You can be part of a movement of ordinary Americans coming together to bring about the change we need.
The Pennsylvania primary is coming up in two weeks, on Tuesday, April 22nd. Thousands of volunteers are working every day to build our movement here.
But with all eyes watching the outcome of this important contest, people are needed from across the country to come reach out to potential supporters in Pennsylvania and make sure everyone is ready and excited for Primary Day.
Will you join us in Pennsylvania and help Get Out The Vote for Barack?
http://pa.barackobama.com/cometoPA
No prior political experience is necessary. The team in Pennsylvania will be here to make sure you have all the support and training you need to have an impact on our Get Out The Vote effort
I live just outside Washington,DC. I will be going to Springfield,Pa 10 miles south west of Philadelphia,Pa on April 12,and returning on April 13. I have room for 3 more people.
I will be going to the Harrisburg,Pa on April,!9 and returning April 20,2008
I will be going to the Durham - Raleigh, North Carolina area April 26 and returning
April 27,2008.
This campaign can only succeed if we take its future into your own hands.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
wizthom's Comment:
wizthom's Comment:
"
it's a sad day for America,
to be reminded of the injustice done,
it's a joyful day for all USA,
to join and honor a hero as one,
the dream lives ,the price was paid,
in blood guts and gore ,
both black and white who gave their life,
for the struggle of civil rights,
the dream lives on,
as i humble myself before a fellow dreamer,
martin Luther king,bobby Kennedy,
lets join hands in the brotherhood of man,
and sing free At last ,free at last,thank God,
almighty free at last,
at lest to dream ,at lest to have hope,
at lest to have faith,in a brighter day,
black white red and yellow,
doesn't matter the race creed r color,
we are one in the brotherhood of man,peace wisemanspeeks copy@rightso8
NubianGraphics. com
LOVE IS THE FORCE ,THAT RULES US ALL,,"
Friday, April 4, 2008
What would Martin Luther King say, today?
What would Martin Luther King say, today?
Martin Luther King - "Why I am opposed to the war in Iraq"
Wake Up
Martin Luther King, Jr./I will never forget you
NubianGraphics.com
NubianGraphics.com
NubianGraphics.com
NubianGraphics.com
Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the son of Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. Although Dr. King's name was mistakenly recorded as "Michael King" on his birth certificate, this was not discovered until 1934, when his father applied for a passport.[citation needed] He had an older sister, Willie Christine (September 11, 1927) and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel (July 30, 1930 – July 1, 1969). King sang with his church choir at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie Gone with the Wind. He entered Morehouse College at age fifteen, skipping his ninth and twelfth high school grades without formally graduating. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in sociology, and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity (B.D.) degree in 1951. In September 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) on June 5, 1955[2] (but see the Plagiarism section for controversy regarding this degree).
Civil rights activism
In 1953, at age 24, King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to comply with the Jim Crow laws that required her to give up her seat to a white man. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by E. D. Nixon (head of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and led by King, soon followed. (In March 1955, a 15 year old school girl, Claudette Colvin, suffered the same fate, but King did not become involved.[3]) The boycott lasted for 381 days, the situation becoming so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on all public transport.
King was instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, a group created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King continued to dominate the organization. King was an adherent of the philosophies of nonviolent civil disobedience used successfully in India by Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, and he applied this philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. In 1959, he wrote The Measure of A Man, from which the piece What is Man?, an attempt to sketch the optimal political, social, and economic structure of society, is derived.
Attributing his inspiration for non-violent activism to the example of Mahatma Gandhi, he visited the Gandhi family in India in 1959, with assistance from the Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The trip to India affected King in a profound way, deepening his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America’s struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.” [4]
The FBI began wiretapping King in 1961, fearing that Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over six years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position.
King correctly recognized that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that made the Civil Rights Movement the single most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.
King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
King and the SCLC applied the principles of nonviolent protest with great success by strategically choosing the method of protest and the places in which protests were carried out in often dramatic stand-offs with segregationist authorities. Sometimes these confrontations turned violent. King and the SCLC were instrumental in the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, where divisions within the black community and the canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts; in the Birmingham protests in the summer of 1963; and in the protest in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. King and the SCLC joined forces with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, in December 1964, where SNCC had been working on voter registration for several months.[5]
On several occasions Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. Speaking to Alex Haley in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of US$50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils."[7] His 1964 book Why We Can't Wait elaborated this idea further, presenting it as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor.[8]
Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church — exactly one year before his death — King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:“ A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just."[9] ”
King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. Time called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
With regard to Vietnam, King often claimed that North Vietnam "did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands." King also praised North Vietnam's land reform.[10] He accused the United States of having killed a million Vietnamese, "mostly children."[11]
The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, sparked in part by his affiliation with and training at the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism:“ You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.[12] ”
King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism," he also rejected Communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism," and its "political totalitarianism."[13]
King also stated in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech:[14] "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. However, according to the article "Coalition Building and Mobilization Against Poverty", King and SCLC's Poor People's Campaign was not supported by the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Bayard Rustin. Their opposition incorporated arguments that the goals of Poor People Campaign was too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.[15]
The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington—engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be—until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."
King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"—appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness." His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism, and that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."[16]
Martin Luther King Day Comments - DazzleJunction.com
Martin Luther King Day Comments - DazzleJunction.com
Celebrating the birth of famous African American Civil Rights Leader at hitupmyspot.com
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For!!!
Help Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina
You can have a major impact on the race for the Democratic nomination. We need your help to build our movement on the ground.
Join fellow Barack Obama supporters and travel to Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina and volunteer to work for the campaign.
No prior experience is needed. Simply let us know when you can join us and a local organizer will provide you with more information
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