On March 29, 1968, less than a week before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to support a strike by Black sanitation workers who were exposed to hazardous chemicals and dirty air and water on a daily basis — far more often than their white counterparts, and for far less pay. That…
Several communities across the country are observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day with multigenerational activities, in which grandparents, parents and children reflect, and act, on the legacy of King’s work. The Forward asked three individuals from the Black Jewish community whose families had different experiences in the Civil Rights Movement to write about one of…
When it comes to issues of race and racism, we live in tumultuous, conflict-ridden times. Often in the media and sometimes in our daily lives, we don’t see positive examples of cross-racial or cross-cultural solidarity. So it’s understandable that we would highlight the positive examples of this solidarity when we’re given the opportunity to do…
It can be tempting to remember the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. as a quiet dreamer whose vision of racial equality involved nothing more than prayers for peace and hopes for an end to racial tension. It’s easy to rework the civil rights leader’s tremendous achievements and writings as a plea for tolerance that…
Residents of Leesburg, Virginia, discovered fliers purporting to be distributed by the racist terror group the Ku Klux Klan over the weekend. According to local news channel WTOP, the fliers denigrated Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is celebrated nationwide on Monday. “The timing of it we think was pre-emptively planned by this individual…
Happy to wake up to clear blue skies Saturday morning, and with the long Martin Luther King Day weekend before me, I decided to take Leo the Labradoodle on a proper walk around my Central Harlem neighborhood (as opposed to the corner-and-back approach we took in the rain on Friday). Rather than putting on the…
Just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the National Library of Israel has unveiled a timely letter from its Martin Buber Archive. In 1965 Buber, just before his death, joined a group of Hebrew University professors in writing to President Lyndon B. Johnson to emphasize the importance of the end of King’s brief incarceration following…
I will never forget the first time someone called me a racist. In the fourth grade, I got into a pushing match in the cafeteria with Umar, an African-American classmate, the cause of which I can no longer remember. The two of us were sent to the principal’s office, and when asked why he hit…
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