People’s Assembly continues Dr. King’s dream

Strong and urgent voices of protest and plans for future organizing highlighted the Rhode Island People’s Assembly ­Annual Martin Luther King Conference Jan. 21 in Providence.

WW photo

Workers World Party First Secretary Larry Holmes, delivered the keynote address. He quoted one of Dr. King’s last public statements: “What good are civil rights without economic rights?” Holmes urged the assembly to understand the class-struggle dimensions of the current period.

“We must look past whatever shortcomings we feel about the Occupy Wall Street movement and understand that what is happening now is part of the worldwide collapse of capitalism as more sectors of the previously privileged working class are now experiencing what it’s like to have no future, ” stated Holmes.

In his last days before he was assassinated, Dr. King’s Poor Peoples Campaign was planning to organize what came to be known as Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1968. This forerunner of today’s Occupy movement was in response to devastating Black unemployment that had not been relieved by the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in law, which legally desegregated public places, especially in the Jim Crow South.

Mary Kay Harris, lead organizer for Direct Action for Rights and Equality and a longtime Providence activist, co-chaired the conference.

During the assembly floor discussion, John Prince of Providence condemned the prison-industrial complex: ”It is disturbing that people who are recently released from prison are denied jobs because of their record. The women’s prison here is overcrowded. We are forced into a future of jails, institution or death!”

Another participant, just released from an 18-year incarceration, urged the assembly to remember the contributions of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party, declaring that “imprisoned youth have the most revolutionary potential. We must learn from what [BPP chair] Huey Newton said: that vanguard leadership must take its cue from the people.”

Martha Yager, from the American Friends Service Committee, told of the brave actions of women from Occupy Providence who were currently occupying the House of Compassion, a residential program for women living with HIV in Cumberland, R.I., that’s slated for devastating cutbacks. (houseofcompassionri.org/)

The RIPA is currently organizing its annual MLK Unity Day April 4 at Providence City Hall. For more infomation, contact [email protected].