Hundreds of people went out of their houses holding torches in Charlottesville, Virginia. They angrily shouted against black people, acting like the Ku Klux Klan group. I'm sorry to tell you, but I writing this article in 2017, not in the 19th century.
The protest first began when a statue of General Robert Edward Lee was overthrown. Edward Lee commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the America Civil War (1861 - 1865).
Some states wanted their independence because they were against the abolition of slavery. He lost the war, but was considered a hero by those who didn't want slavery to end. So the group marched making Nazi greetings, with posters that said bad things about black people, homosexuals and the Jewish.
The minorities, which were reached by the attacks, hit back, and the confrontation made three victims.
The recent United States presidential election, which culminated in the victory of the Republican Donald Trump, divided the country. His conservative policies please the nationalists, but not the minorities. The United States have a historical problem with racism and violence.
Martin Luther King Jr, along with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, is the man most responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and these laws are ones most responsible for the current achievements of all minorities in the United States. Hated by some, just as vigorously as revered by others, King was killed in Memphis in 1968.
Tragically, Martin Luther King Jr's life was far from being the only one claimed in the 1950s and 60s as African Americans and their sympathizers battled for radical equality. Malcom X, a leader of the black Muslims, was assassinated in New York City in 1965. He was, to many mainstream Americans, more radical and altogether scarier than King, but the reasons for his killing likely had to do with his separation from the Muslim movement not retribution from any white racist element.
In 1964, during the Freedom Summer campaign, activists went missing after the car in which they were travelling in Mississippi was intercepted at a country road. Their bodies were eventually found in an earthen dam. They had been shot dead by a white mob. It took until 2005 before a leader of the local Ku Klux Klan was found guilty in this case.
The Klan was also responsible for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, which claimed the lives of four girls, aged 11 to 14. It wasn't until 1977 that one of the four men who planted the bomb was convicted. Two more suspects have been jailed in recent years.
Once, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Unfortunately, his dream hasn't come true yet. However, when King was shot and killed in 1968, his work was far from being finished. It had only started.
Ramon Vilhora
RA 200909069
