Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

Call me irascible. But you either have to be grumpy (I think that is what irascible means), or laugh when you read this guy.

First, he creates a story out of thin air about Obama being pro-voucher. Then he wonders why the national press or the Clinton campaign didn’t pick up the story. Then bemoans the fact that this shows that nobody out there is as wise as he is.

Martin Luther King and James Orange just behind him.

When the veterans of the Southern Civil Rights Movement speak of the Battle of Selma, they remember a young teenager named Jimmy Lee Jackson.

Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered by a state trooper while he protested outside a Perry County jail in 1965.

Inside the jail was James Orange, an aide to Martin Luther King.

I think it is important to remember that in middle of the present presidential campaign, James Orange was in jail because he was attempting to register black voters, a crime in Alabama just 40 years ago.

The NY Times reports today that James Orange died on Saturday at the age of 65.

In an interview on Thursday, Charles Steele Jr., the current president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said:

“That sparked the movement in terms of Dr. King and others saying that they would take the body of Jimmie Lee Jackson and put it on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery and let Gov. George Wallace see what type of racists we have. That became the march from Selma to Montgomery, which ultimately brought about the 1965 voter rights bill.”

Mr. Orange’s arrest in Perry County was just one of dozens that he had faced while organizing protests in Alabama. “The children’s demonstrations in Birmingham had transformed James Orange from hulking high school drifter to precocious minister of nonviolence,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch wrote in his 2006 book, “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68.”