[Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day] King colleague urges fight on poverty, racism, war

From The St Paul Pioneer Press

BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press

On what would have been the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 77th birthday, a fellow civil rights pioneer called Sunday in Minneapolis for Americans to rededicate themselves to the principles for which King lived and died.

"Martin called us to fight the three-headed monster: poverty, racism and war," the Rev. Joseph Lowery told about 900 people gathered in the Basilica of St. Mary for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.

"We're still judging people by the color of their skins and not by the content of their character," said Lowery, echoing one of King's most famous speeches. He said overt, legal segregation has been defeated, but discrimination and economic disparities still live.

Lowery, an 84-year-old United Methodist minister who was an ally of King in civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, said Americans, especially people of color, continue to be victimized by social ills that he said are today's real "weapons of mass destruction."

"Millions of people in this country are forced to live on minimum wages," Lowery said. "That is a weapon of mass destruction."

Referring to the high proportion of African-Americans in prisons across the United States, he said,"Incarceration without rehabilitation is a weapon of mass destruction."

And, in a message that he said was directed only to the black members of his audience, Lowery said: "We've got, in the black community, too many children having children. That's a weapon of mass self-destruction."

He also called for blacks to vote and to run for political offices. "Failing to participate in the political process is a weapon of mass self-destruction," he said.

Lowery was one of the founders, with King, of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He was the conference's president from 1977 until 1998.

In 1965, Lowery led a delegation that took the demands of a group of Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marchers to the late Alabama governor George Wallace.

The celebration of King's birthday Sunday at the Basilica was part hand-clapping gospel music and part pulpit-pounding preaching by Lowery.

The retired preacher repeatedly called the King holiday a "holy day" on which people should commit themselves again to the goals and methods of the man he called a "nonviolent revolutionary."

Lowery said he was neither Democrat nor Republican but rather a United Methodist. Nevertheless, he repeatedly blasted policies, both domestic and foreign, associated with President Bush, congressional Republicans and religious fundamentalists on the right.

He called for an end to the war in Iraq and criticized the Bush tax cuts without naming Bush.

"There's something wrong with the system when a handful of people have more than they ever did, while masses of people have less than they always did," he said.

"Our problem isn't same-sex this and same-sex that," Lowery said. "Our problem is jobs and livable wages. … You can't say you're for equal rights and then make exceptions."

In a news conference before he spoke, Lowery said King, who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, knew his civil rights and anti-war advocacy put him in danger.

"He knew he was being stalked," Lowery said of King. "He knew his life was in danger. But he never wavered."