OurWeekly cover stories continue to garner numerous accolades from our readers. As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we offer a condensed version of some of our best cover stories from this past year. – OW.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s
European Odyssey
By William Covington
OW Contributor
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
-Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963.
The above quote is a favorite of Al Dahr, a third year international film student of North African heritage currently attending the University of Southern California. His latest project is a documentary that will expose the similarities of social inequalities of African American youth in South Los Angeles and young third-generation African French immigrants in France who rioted in 2005 second-generation immigrant riots.
When asked about using the term “second generation French immigrant” and not African French, he jokingly responds that African French is a language spoken throughout North Africa. He adds that France’s African citizens are referred to as French immigrants of a certain generation as opposed to French citizens.
Dahr considers himself a historian specializing in Dr. King and believes that if France had a Dr. King, life for the people of color could have possibly been improved.
“Although times are rough in the United States for African Americans, you guys did have a successful Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s headed by Dr. King,” said the USC student. “Our 1968 civil rights protest was void of race and involved labor and Communists. You gotta know your history, so you can plan your next plot. If we as African immigrants living in Europe, would have studied Dr. King’s strategy, we could have built on it and utilized his violence-free protests which are the heart of Islam, “harming no one” but getting your message across.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did visit France on several occasions.
Dahr believes that the French exploited Dr. King by publicly using his name, for example Boulevard Martin Luther King, in Nantes, France, to promote an idea of being pro-Africa even though their attitude toward their African-descended citizens is awful.
While Nantes honored Martin Luther King by naming a suburban boulevard after him, what might have pleased him more is the monument now being built-downtown next to the port-to honor the victims of the slave trade.
There is also Martin Luther King Park in Paris and Martin Luther King Complex (an amphitheatre), Annemasse, Haute-Savoie.
France is not the only European country enamoured with King. The Germans also have a Martin Luther King Jr. Olympic Park, in Munich. The civil rights activist actually journeyed to Berlin when the nation was physically divided by its political differences.
Other geographical landmarks named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
The Martin Luther King Jr. Mural, Newtown, Australia (an Inner West suburb of Sydney)
Martin Luther King Park, Vienna, Austria
Westminster Abbey, London, England
Martin Luther King Jr. Forest, Israel
Via Martin Luther King, Naples, Italy
Piazza Martin Luther King, Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy
Place Martin Luther King, Anderlecht, Brussels
Reparations revisited
Actions of Caribbean nations spur new interest
By Cynthia E. Griffin
OW Managing Editor
Ron Daniels is well aware of the ebb and flow of progress that social justice issues can sometimes endure. An activist/scholar who holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Youngstown State University, a masters of arts in political science from the Rockefeller School of Public Affairs in Albany, N.Y., and a doctor of philosophy in Africana Studies from the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, he currently serves as distinguished lecturer at York College, City University of New York.
Daniels is also a keen student of history and, consequently, is not surprised that the social cause that is near and dear to his heart-reparations-has for the last few decades ridden on waves of awareness and popularity.
But what the historian does know about the key to successfully riding waves and keeping an issue afloat is that social activists who want to advance their cause have to be prepared to use the events that prompt these ups and downs as tools. That is exactly what he planned to do April 9-12 when his New York-based Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) hosted the Caricom Reparations Commission’s meeting in New York.
The Caricom Commission is chaired by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor designate of the University of the West Indies. In 2013, 14 of the 15 nations that comprise the Caricom Secretariat-Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago-unanimously agreed to create a reparations committee to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by European countries to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community for native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a radicalized system of chattel slavery. They also filed suit against 11 nations in the United Nation’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague in the Netherlands.
According to the Al Jazzera America news service, they hired British law firm Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for compensation for hundreds of Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government as they fought for the liberation of their country during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Caricom countries focused on Britain for its role in slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean, France for slavery in Haiti and the Netherlands for Suriname, a Caricom member and former Dutch colony on the northeastern edge of South America.
And rather than seeking reparations for slavery itself, the nations want compensation for the lasting effects it caused.
Caricom is comparing their demand to Germany recompensing Jewish people for the Holocaust and New Zealand compensating Maoris, according to an article in the British Daily Mail.
