With Confederate flag gone, King Day rally shifts focus

“Artistic and creative empowerment in the areas of music, theater and dance is essential to Dr. King’s vision of building a beloved community”, said Ronn Johnson, CEO of Martin Luther King Family Services.

The state NAACP said there is still more work to do to honor King and the theme of this year’s rally is “education equity”, with speakers calling for SC to spend more money to help students in poorer, more rural school districts, which frequently have a majority of black students.

Those attending Monday’s events included U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and West Virginia First Lady Joanne Jaeger Tomblin.

San Antonio police did not immediately return a message Monday on number of participants in the march organized by the city’s MLK Jr.

But not all states took the day to remember King’s life. Celebrate! Act! King’s Legacy of Freedom for Our World. We say wonderful things about each other.

In South Carolina, civil rights leaders planned a march to their state capitol as in past years when their rally highlighted calls to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds.

Within these renewed conversations are many voices, including one that invokes the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not for his leadership in the Civil Rights movement, but rather in spite of it. There is a pervasive belief that lives online and among some conservative pundits that Dr. King wouldn’t have approved of a modern movement like Black Lives Matter.

An overflow crowd showed up at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to celebrate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

The banner was taken down over the summer after police said a young white man who had posed for photos with a rebel flag shot nine black church members to death during a Bible study in Charleston. There was a heavier security presence compared with previous years because of the candidates.