mlk

"More Bridges to Cross..."

By • Feb 16, 2021

“At that time, we’d been singing songs, we shall overcome, and before I’d be a slave…be dead and buried in my grave,” says Bennie Lee Tucker. He’s seventy four years old, and he spent the last fifty five of those years here in Selma. “And we gonna let nobody turn us around, no more Governor Wallace…no more white folk,” he says.

On the front porch of his home on Eugene Avenue, Tucker recalls March 7th, 1965. It was the height of the voting rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior wasn’t the name on everyone’s mind that day.

MLK signatures go on the auction block

By • Feb 14, 2021
UA-CPT

Admirers of Dr. Martin Luther King, junior have the opportunity to snag a unique piece of memorabilia. An auction house is offering pages of an old jail record signed by Dr. King while he was incarcerated in Alabama in 1963. It's there that King wrote his famous "letter from the Birmingham jail." A jail worker rescued the documents which feature a dozen King signatures.

"The King of Alabama"

By Alabama Public Radio • Jan 18, 2021
James Peppler

From April of 2018...

“If you did not know him, and had never heard anything about him, and were to go into a room where he was seated, he was a person who would not monopolize a conversation,” says Fred Gray, a civil rights attorney in Tuskegee, Alabama. He’s recalling one of this earliest clients, Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior.

“I think initially most people heard it on the media, and those who heard it, told other people about it, so it spread like wildfire. There wasn’t any question about that. It hit me when he was killed, because I knew we had lost a great leader.”

Jefferson County to Preserve Jail Remanent Where MLK was Held

By • Jan 12, 2020
Associated Press

An Alabama county is taking steps to preserve what's left of the lockup where officials say Martin Luther King Jr. served his final time behind bars. 

Jefferson County commissioners approved a resolution Thursday to memorialize an area inside the county courthouse in Birmingham that used to be a jail.

The county says King was held there in 1967. He served a brief sentence for contempt after losing an appeal on his conviction for demonstrating without a permit years earlier.

King was assassinated about five months later in Memphis, Tennessee.

"Make it a like a butterfly..." The Man Behind Dr. King's Mustache

By • Apr 1, 2018
APR

This Wednesday marks fifty years since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. All month long, the APR news team is examining Dr. King’s work in Alabama and his impact here. The civil rights leader inspired his supporters with the Montgomery bus boycott, his letter from the Birmingham Jail, and by leading voting rights marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. APR’s Pat Duggins reports on one witness to Dr. King’s earliest work in the civil rights movement, and the place where the two men met...

Southern States Try To Cash In On Civil Rights Tourism

By • Jan 14, 2018

As the nation honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior this weekend, southern states are banding together to promote civil rights tourism. Fourteen states stretching from Kansas to Delaware, including all of the Deep South, are joining to promote the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. The monument highlights about one hundred and thirty sites linked to the modern civil rights movement. The list includes the hotel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated to the birthplace of the confederacy. The joint effort is being unveiled as part of the MLK holiday weekend.

APR Selma coverage wins national awards

By alabama public radio • Jun 29, 2016
APR

The industry group Public Radio News Directors, Incorporated named Alabama Public Radio the winner of two first place “PRNDI” awards. These prestigious national honors are connected to APR’s international award-winning coverage of the 50th anniversary of the “bloody Sunday” attacks on voting rights marchers in Selma in 1965. State troopers and a sheriff’s posse used clubs and tear gas to beat back demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.