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The true Negro does not want integration… He realizes his potential is far better among his own race… It will destroy our race eventually…In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife… It boils down to whether we are going to take God’s Word as final.

Jerry Falwell in 1958

the world is now one fewer fat, bigoted, ignorant, backward, self-aggrandising, televangelistic whore, and i, for one, will not miss him in the slightest.

on the other hand, i mourn the loss of Yolanda King a lot more.

Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Dies
Yolanda King, Daughter and Eldest Child of Martin Luther King Jr., Dies at Age 51
May 16, 2007

Yolanda Denise King, daughter and eldest child of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has died, said Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center.

King died late Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 51. Klein said the family did not know the cause of death but that relatives think it might have been a heart problem.

The actor, speaker and producer was the founder and head of Higher Ground Productions, billed as a “gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.” On her company’s Web site, King described her mission as encouraging personal growth and positive social change.

King was also an author and advocate for peace and nonviolence, and held memberships in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which her father co-founded in 1957 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her death comes more than a year after the death of her mother, Coretta Scott King.

She appeared in numerous films and played Rosa Parks in the 1978 miniseries “King.” She also appeared in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” and founded a production company called Higher Ground Productions.

Born in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., King was just an infant when her home was bombed during the turbulent civil rights era.

She was the most visible and outspoken among the Kings’ four children during activities honoring this year’s Martin Luther King Day in January, the first since Coretta Scott King’s death.

At her father’s former Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, she performed a series of one-actor skits on King Day this year that told stories including a girl’s first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student’s recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Ala.

She also urged the audience at Ebenezer to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday each year to ask tough questions about their own beliefs on prejudice.

“We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,” King said.

When asked then by The Associated Press how she was dealing with the loss of her mother, King responded: “I connected with her spirit so strongly. I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.”

A flag at The King Center, which King’s mother founded in 1968 and where she was a board member, was lowered to half-staff on Wednesday.

Yolanda King is survived by her sister, the Rev. Bernice A. King; two brothers, Martin Luther King III and Dexter Scott King; and an extended family.

Arrangements were to be announced later, the family said in a statement.


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so ezra graduated from college yesterday, and i was so busy with other things that i completely missed jerry falwell’s death. more on that later.

blurdge
blurdge

ezra graduated from college yesterday. that’s so unreal for me to realise, in so many ways… it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that i was sitting, holding a tiny baby in my arms on garden street in bellingham. it doesn’t seem like that long ago that he was graduating from high school and i was in the midst of a legal battle with his mother, and i was working as a test lead at openwave… and that’s all before my injury and everything that came after that… so totally unreal. and yet i’m so proud of him, if for no other reason than he bucked the odds and graduated from college in spite of his mother and i, who both dropped out of college… among other things. there are pictures of the graduation ceremony and stuff, including a picture of the psycho hose-beast from hell, who said her first civil word to me since ezra was 14 years old.

ezra & salamandir

the psycho hose-beast from hell
she’d go nuts if she knew i had actually posted a picture of her on internet, which is the primary reason this picture is here