On today, the People’s Organization For Progress will host its annual march to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Officials said in a press release that participants will assemble at the Lincoln Monument, 12 Springfield Avenue, at 4 pm.
According to officials, this year’s march will highlight the fight for living wages, the ongoing scourge of police brutality, and the fight against voter suppression.
"It will include particular spotlights on Solidarity with Amazon Workers in Bessemer, Alabama seeking unionization and the international campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal and other aging political prisoners in the face of the Covid19 Pandemic," officials said.
Among those joining P.O.P. for this action will be area members from the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union led by veteran labor leader Charles Hall and Jersey Youth For Mumia.
The voting process for the Bessemer workers done by mail ended on March 29th. Their bold efforts have inspired Amazon workers in Denver, Portland, Baltimore and New Orleans to pursue unionization.
For the organizers, the call for Solidarity with the Amazon workers, who are two-thirds African American and are up against perhaps the wealthiest corporation in the world, recalls the poignant memory of Dr. King going into Memphis, Tennessee, to rally with Black Sanitation Workers hauntingly and unknowingly face his own death officials said.
"Just as pointedly, on the matter of police brutality, the trial for Derrick Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer allegedly responsible for the videotaped death of George Floyd last year on May 25th, is underway garnering national attention in a fully militarized court and community setting.
New evaluations of the haunting incident have revealed that Chauvin was on Floyd’s neck and back for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, and not eight minutes and forty-nine seconds as was previously asserted".
More locally, the beginnings of a New Jersey bill authorizing Civil Complaint Review Boards for communities who desire them cleared its first hurdle in the NJ State Assembly with overwhelming community support.
"As this goes to press, on the dangerously underreported matter of voter suppression, 43 state governments have instituted some 253 new voter suppression laws in the aftermath of the defeat of former President Donald Trump," officials said.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the premiere voice of the Civil Rights Movement, the ‘Drum Major for Justice,’ was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was only 39.