California Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King and the Los Angeles Freedom Riders
In advance of Black History Month and in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Day, Peace and Freedom Party member Joe Delaplaine looks back at Dr. King’s interaction with and inspiration of activism in California. Click on any of the embedded images for a full poster-sized version suitable for printing.
This month, we celebrate the ongoing accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Born January 15, 1929, Dr. King is closely associated with his leadership, organizing Southern states in the middle half of the last century. What’s forgotten, however, are the hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians he inspired. From the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968, King spoke at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, L.A. Sports Arena, Jefferson High School, in Willowbrook/Compton, Chapman University, UCLA, the Hollywood Palladium, among many other locations in California.
(For a map and other details on Dr. King’s major public appearance in California between 1956 and ’63, click here.)
The Freedom Riders
In 1961, over 400 men and women across the country, many inspired by Dr. King, organized themselves into the Freedom Riders. These brave volunteers of all ages and nationalities openly confronted racial segregation on buses, in interstate transportation waiting rooms and in depot restaurants in order to win the right for anyone to sit, eat, or travel wherever they pleased without fear of discrimination or violence.
Although integrated interstate public transit was technically legal in 1961, many states continued to very violently enforce “whites only” segregation. The Riders knew they faced being beaten and most likely killed simply for riding public transit in such states; however, they did so to end discrimination once and literally “for all”.
Read more: California Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King and the Los Angeles Freedom Riders
On Tuesday, October 9, Pacific Gas & Electric, the publicly traded monopoly that supplies most of Northern California’s power needs, announced that they would be shutting off power for much of their service area due to the risk of wildfire posed by dryness, heat and high winds. These shutoffs would affect over 800,000 of their customers.
by Daniel Immerwahr
On June 14, 2019, a judge in London ruled in favor of an extradition hearing for Julian Assange. Assange is set to appear before a British court in February 2020 in a hearing on whether the WikiLeaks founder should be extradited to the U.S. on 18 counts of espionage. He is currently serving a 50-week sentence in Belmarsh Prison in southeast London for bail violations after taking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape allegations in 2012. At that time, Assange claimed that Sweden’s real motivation was to send him to the United States for criminal prosecution in retaliation for his exposure of U.S. government activity.
The Green New Deal, as proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, has a lot to like. There is no doubt that manufacturing and agricultural production must be overhauled in a sustainable manner while meeting the needs of the people. However, in its laundry lists of projects and solutions, the Green New Deal makes a major omission: any mention of the U.S. military.
California's socialist and feminist political party urges you to:
The Peace and Freedom Party is committed to socialism, democracy, ecology, feminism and racial equality. We represent the working class, those without capital in a capitalist society. We organize toward a world where cooperation replaces competition, a world where all people are well fed, clothed and housed; where all women and men have equal status; where all individuals may freely endeavor to fulfill their own talents and desires; a world of freedom and peace where every community retains its cultural integrity and lives with all others in harmony. 
