Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Walk Celebration set Friday

The 28th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Unity Walk Celebration will be held in Russellville early this Friday morning at 8:15. The public is invited to attend and participate.

This event will begin at the historic Bank Street AME Church on 564 East Fifth Street in Russellville. The walk will proceed to the historic Logan County Courthouse where the program will be held up stairs.

Commonwealth Attorney Gail Guiling, Rev. Lee Fishback, Logan County High and Russellville High school systems, parents, churches, community and the public who have been consistent supporters will participate again this year. Both schools normally bring students to the courthouse to learn more about the history of the integration movement led peacefully by Dr. King.

For more information, contact Community Projects, Inc. President Charles Neblett or Marvinia Benton Neblett at 270-847-8270, 270-803-4181 orfreedom_neblett@yahoo.com.

From Wikipedia: On Oct. 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965, he and the SCLC helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches and the following year, he took the movement north to Chicago. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". In 1968 King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4, in Memphis.

King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets and a county in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor. A memorial statue on the National Mall was opened to the public in 2011.

Charles Neblett, a former member of Logan Fiscal Court, also is chronicled in Wikipedia, because of his association with Dr. King and the movement as one of four members of the Freedom Singers. Wilipedia notes:

The Freedom Singers, a group that formed in 1962 in Albany, Ga. to educate communities about civil rights issues through song, consisted of four black members all under the age of twenty-one: Cordell Reagon (tenor), Bernice Johnson Reagon (alto), Charles Neblett (bass), and Rutha Mae Harris (soprano).  The Freedom Singers toured the South, sometimes performing as many as four concerts a day. The songs were mostly spirituals and hymns, with "characteristic call-and-response" and free improvisation. Venues included around 200 college campuses, churches, house parties, demonstrations, marches, and jails. Often, the Freedom singers were jailed for refusing to leave an area, while supporters and sympathizers also risked police brutality.

On Feb. 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four African American college students protested segregation and Jim Crow laws by sitting at a "whites-only" lunch counter. Using sit-ins as a means of protest became increasingly popular throughout the South, and the anti-segregationist organizers began to see college students as a potential resource. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), played a central role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded in early 1960 in Raleigh, N. C. in response to the success of a surge of sit-ins in Southern college towns, where black students refused to leave restaurants in which they were denied service based on their race. This form of nonviolent protest brought SNCC to national attention, throwing a harsh public light on white racism in the South. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) called a conference later that year to found a new organization, and from this grew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, usually pronounced "snick"). Joining forces with Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), white and black activists rode buses together into Southern towns to protest segregated bus terminals. Soon the SNCC established a reputation as the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights movement.

The Freedom Singers were intrinsically connected to SNCC, which was formed on April 16, 1960, in Raleigh, North Carolina to organize against growing injustice and violence against black people. The group's main focus was to educate the black community about their basic freedoms, including the right to vote, and encourage the integration of "whites-only" territory. Cordell Reagon, one of the field secretaries of SNCC, was the founding member of the Freedom Singers. SNCC planned and funded the Freedom Singers' tours and paid the members ten to twenty dollars a week to work as field secretaries for the movement. These young field secretaries were usually "dropped off" in communities where they had to arrange for their own food and lodging. Often group members would stay with families, helping with chores and educating children.The original group disbanded in 1963; at that time SNCC executive secretary Jim Forman sent Matthew Jones to Atlanta to reorganize the group.Singing was a link between the church and the civil rights movement. The songs, influenced by gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, and which have a hymn-like quality, show a relationship between "secular and spiritual elements" with ornamented, richly harmonized and syncopated part singing."Singing was integral" to the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, helping to bring young black Americans together to work for racial equality.^[9] Some think of the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s as "the greatest singing movement in our nation's history." The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called music "the soul of the movement." 

But although the civil rights movement is closely associated with music, attempts to educate the public through music were actually not that common. The SNCC Freedom Singers were an exception, blending spoken and musical communication to educate the public. Bernice Johnson Reagon once stated that the Freedom singers were, in fact, "a singing newspaper." Singing together gave protesters strength to participate in demonstrations and freedom rides—and to endure jail time, verbal and physical assaults, police dog attacks, and high-pressure fire hoses aimed at them. Singing these songs united the protesters in their common goal: freedom and equality.

The highpoint of the Freedom Singers' career occurred in the spring and summer of 1963 when they appeared at the March on Washington, an event that drew 350,000 people. The Freedom Singers contributed to a live album for the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, where the group sang "We Shall Overcome" linking arms with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Also in 1963, the Freedom Singers recorded their only studio album for Mercury Records.

The New York Times identified the Freedom Singers as "the ablest performing group" to emerge from a broad field of folk musicians.  After recording one album for Mercury in 1963, the original group disbanded.