Historic marker in honor of African Americans 

who died at Fort Pillow 

unveiled Juneteenth 2018 at Memphis National Cemetery

Fort Pillow Massacre of 1864: WE WILL NEVER FORGET!

On April 12, 1864, a Union garrison on the Mississippi River called Fort Pillow fell to Confederate troops led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, The notorious slave trader and future first KKK Grand Wizard. The Union loss might have been unremarkable, had it not been for disturbing rumors in the days that followed. Survivors said the Confederates had massacred black soldiers and civilians, shouting curses and firing until their bullets ran out. Fort Pillow quickly became a contested memory, with Rebels claiming victory, and Union soldiers alleging slaughter after surrender. In response to the controversy, Congress held an investigation, the records of which survive today. Evidence confirms that nearly 300 Union prisoners of war were shot to death, and the numbers indicate that black soldiers bore the worst of it.

In 1867, the soldiers’ graves were moved to the Memphis National Cemetery. At 10 a.m. April 12, 2016, The W.E. A.L.L. B.E. Group Inc. and the Memphis Area Branch (MAB) of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH) held a wreath-laying ceremony at the Memphis National Cemetery to honor the African American soldiers and civilians who gave their lives at Fort Pillow.

Then, a new discovery came to light. In December 2016, Callie Herd was approached by Lyndon Comstock, who had located 109 graves of African American soldiers who died in this massacre. This was a significant find that would make the ceremony that much more powerful.

In 2017 and 2018, given the importance of public memory, the W.E. A.L.L. Be Group Inc. then took the lead in organizing a grassroots commemorative project that included the Memphis Area Branch (MAB) of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH), descendants of Fort Pillow soldiers, military representatives (American Legion, Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and retired military), Operation Step Down, Junior ROTC students, "House of Mtenzi Museum," organizations, and several educational groups.

In memory of the African American soldiers and civilians who died at Fort Pillow, an unveiling of a historic maker in honor of them at 10 a.m. on June 19, 2018 (Juneteenth) at the Memphis National Cemetery. 

  
For More Info On The Fort Pillow Massacre and Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest Please Check Out The Following Links:

W.E. A.L.L. B.E. TV: THE River Still Runs Red 2017: Andrew Ward On Fort Pillow & Nathan Bedford Forrest

https://youtu.be/2-Z95EmKJ2Y

'River Run Red' Author Andrew Ward on The Fort Pillow Massacre & Nathan Bedford Forrest (C-Span)

https://www.c-span.org/video/?189407-1%2Friver-run-red-fort-pillow-massacre

Fort Pillow Massacre Of 1864: WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!! By Jackie Murray

http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2017/03/fort-pillow-massacre-of-1864-we-will.html

#WEALLBETVPlaylist: Never Forget the Fort Pillow Massacre & 1st KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford ForREst #BlackLivesLost:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2dmz6Pnwp_lC01UG-aV

A Review: 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts
Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s book focuses on lingering effects of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination
By Renarda Williams

April 4, 2018 will mark 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

I was a 6-year old first grader at South Alexandria Primary, in Alexandria, Louisiana, when Dr. King was assassinated. On the NBC News, Dr. King lay on the balcony in front of his room, his life ebbing away as the reporter gave the then-known details of the shooting.
I was a confused little boy. I asked my mother why someone would want to shoot Dr. King. All my mother could tell me was that there were people who did not like King because he stood up for the rights of all people in America – Black, Red, Brown and Yellow as well as White – and one those people had shot King. 

As a 56-year-old entrepreneur, Pan Africanist/Africentrist, volunteer advocate and lobbyist for African and African American organizations, I am still hurting from that day all those years ago!

I’m not the only one, as Earl Ofari Hutchinson has demonstrated. In his explosive new book, 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts (Middle Passage Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2018), Hutchinson discusses the 50th anniversary of King's Assassination and probes King's impact in the era of President Donald Trump.

Hutchinson said President Donald Trump proudly boasted that King ‘was a man I have studied, watched, and admired my entire life,’ Hutchinson states in his press release.
"Despite his professed admiration for King, one year into his first term in the Oval Office, Trump has done everything a president could do to try and roll back the very things that King had fought for during his life. Trump has deliberately and cynically claimed ownership of King's towering legacy.”

An author of multiple books on race and politics in America, Hutchinson is a regular contributor to the Huff Post and other publications. He is an occasional guest commentator on CNN, MSNBC and RT News and hosts the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK-FM, 90.7 in Los Angeles, and the Pacifica Network.

In the introduction of 50 Years Later, Hutchinson shares his own memory of April 4, 1968, recounting his mother’s horrified cry: “He’s dead. He’s dead!” 

“The scream, the shout and the tears that flowed like flood waters of a raging stream from my mother were so deafening and plaintive that I had to leave the house,” he writes. 

I want to salute Hutchinson on a book that should wake up people of all races and locales due to revelations concerning the death of Dr. King (Chapter 1: Who Killed King and Why?), the FBI’s involvement in smearing King’s name (Chapter 2: Sex, Lies, and Tapes); how King was more than just a dreamer (Chapter 3: More Than a Dreamer); his legacy ( Chapter 4: Getting a Piece of the Legacy) and the path King cleared for America’s first Black president (Chapter 7: Obama’s Debt to King). 

This book needs to be required reading for those Americans – including some Black ministers, activists and politicians – who turned their backs on King, and those who today could stand to gain some social consciousness. Ideally, they would heed, and benefit, from such chapters as Chapter 5: Ignoring a Holiday and Chapter 6: Cashing in on King. (Chapter 6 took me back to 1993, when I was a columnist/reporter for the Monroe Free Press, a Black weekly newspaper in Monroe, LA. My editor asked if I believed that American retailers would start to cash in on the King birthday holiday; we predicted we’d begin to hear such pitches as: “Come on Down to Our MLK Sale!” and “Check Out our ‘I Have A Dream’ Sale!”)

The food-for-thought chapters continue with Chapter 8: The Other Civil Rights Movement; Chapter 9: The Poor Haven’t Gone Anyway; Chapter 10: Yes to Gay Rights;  and Chapter 11: A New Set of Challenges. Chapter 12: King Versus Trump, pulls no punches.

Hutchinson explores the what-if with Chapter 13: What If King Had Lived? and ends the book with a look at another question: 50 Years Later, is King’s Legacy at Risk?

This book is a reminder that we all must, per as the motto by which I live, Do what we can, when we can, and where we can!

Renarda Williams (aka Abari Sankofa) is a native of Alexandria, Louisiana. He attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), where he majored in history and minored in political science. He has 33 years of experience as a columnist/reporter and contributing writer for small magazines and newspapers throughout Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia, and has more than two decades of experience as a substitute teacher, social worker, and case worker for at-risk children. He is the founder/CEO of The Umoja Network (TUN), a media business. 

Williams is a co-author of the Black Christian fiction book A Time to Praise: A Christmas Anthology (FaiththeWorks Publishing, LLC, Brandon, MS, 2016). His blog, The Empowerment Initiative Online Newsletter (TEION), can be found at renarda1961.blogspot.com.
 
Williams serves as a volunteer and lobbyist with African American and African nonprofit organizations. His passion is empowering the minds of people with his writing for the betterment of humanity. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife, Helaine R. Williams, a features writer and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Feel free to contact Williams at renarda3@aol.com or (501) 765-1873.

        

Middle Passage Press

January 23, 2018
for Immediate Release
Contact:

Pedro Baez 

602-790-0053

Press Advisory:

 

Dr. King Versus Trump

Explosive New Book on the 50^th Anniversary of King’s Assassination

Probes King’s Impact in the Trump Era

Boycotts, threatened boycotts, public denunciations and demands, a march, a demonstration. These were all the familiar tactics virtually patented by King in cities and towns across the South during the heyday of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Nearly fifty years after King’s death these were the tactics used again. This time the target wasn’t a Jim Crow lunch counter or voting booth. The protagonist wasn’t a hardcore, violent prone racist sheriff. The target was Trump. The protest tactics were employed against Trump the instant the White House announced that he would deliver an address at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi on December 9, 2017.

Fifty years later, noted political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in his new book, 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts (Middle Passage Press), March 2018, notes that these were the same tactics that Dr. King employed throughout his decade of struggle for civil rights, and against war and poverty in America. Hutchinson takes an in-depth look at the still powerful impact and relevance of Dr. King’s struggles to the Trump era.

One year into his first term in the Oval Office, Trump had done everything a president could do to try and roll back the very things that King had fought for during his life, says Hutchinson, “Civil rights leaders especially gagged at Trump’s claim in his remarks that King was ‘a man I have studied, watched, and admired for my entire life’.” 

Hutchinson details how the FBI stopped at nothing in its relentless, ruthless, no-holds barred campaign to destroy King even considering trying to turn his wife, Coretta Scott King, into an informer against him, “There was a clear method to the FBI’s diabolical obsession with King. It understood the monumental affect the King led movement had on civil rights, politics, heightened awareness of poverty, his crucial relationship with Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the influence he had on other change movements globally and in America, that of Hispanics, Women, and Gays. Hutchinson poses and tackles the poignant question King raised, “Where Do We Go from Here.”

50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts draws from King’s writings, letters, declassified government files, and documents and essays that focus on King’s murder and the half century of change after King’s murder. This includes an assessment of " King Versus Trump" and “What if King Had Lived?”

50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts is not just another of the countless tributes to and reminiscences on the legacy of Dr. King,” says Hutchinson, “It takes a hard look at the murder, the tumult, and the changes both good and bad that his murder directly and indirectly caused in the nation, then and now.”

Hutchinson seeks to provide a political signpost where Dr.  King would have taken America if he had lived and where the country still should go in the Trump era. “This is more than a book of remembrance,” notes Hutchinson, “it’s a book that asks and tries to answer what Dr. King would say and do about Trump’s America today.”

Author Bio

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of multiple books on race and politics in America. The most recent include; The Obama Legacy, The Trump Challenge to Black America, and From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History. He is a regular commentator on RT News with Ed Schultz and other cable network shows. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

Explosive New Book Marks 50th Anniversary of MLK, Jr. Assassination

Explosive New Book Marks 50^th Anniversary of MLK, Jr. Assassination

Details Little Known Scope of FBI War on King

“The Bureau must take a discreet approach in developing information about Dr. King to use at an opportune time in a counter-intelligence move to discredit him. That discretion must not reach the point of timidity.” The memo was written by Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan on Christmas Eve, 1963 and circulated to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials. This was followed in quick order by a flood of FBI memos, notes, meetings, and strategy sessions. The agency had one aim, and one aim only, to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI had declared war on King, and as promised, it never was timid.

Four and half years after the government’s assault on King kicked off he was murdered in Memphis, April 4, 1968. Now fifty years later, noted political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in his new book, 50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts (Middle Passage Press), March 2018, takes an in-depth look at the lingering doubts and disbelief about the official version of the murder of Dr. King and how that shaped events of the next fifty years.

Hutchinson presents14 pages of FBI memos, files, notes, minutes of meetings, and letters from the final report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations in 1976 that have rarely been fully presented and cited in their entirety. It’s entitled, “The FBI Plans Its Campaign to Discredit Dr. King.” This includes the FBI’s 21 proposals to obliterate King as an African-American leader. The materials are the FBI’s own words detailing the full scope of its plan to destroy King.

Many of the details in the campaign have never been presented in complete detail for the general public—the break ins, forgeries, SCLC plants, inspection of IRS tax filings, bank account seizures, poison pen letters, instigating police raids on King’s hotel and motel rooms, calls to universities, congresspersons to discredit him, and even the Nobel Prize Committee to reject King. Hutchinson details how the FBI stopped at nothing in its relentless, ruthless, no-holds barred campaign to destroy King even considering trying to turn his wife, Coretta Scott King, into an informer against him.

Hutchinson notes, “There was a clear method to the FBI’s diabolical obsession with King. It understood the monumental affect the King led movement had on civil rights, politics, heightened awareness of poverty, his crucial relationship with Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the influence he had on other change movements globally and in America, that of Hispanics, Women, and Gays. Hutchinson poses and tackles the poignant question King raised, “Where Do We Go from Here.”

50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts draws from King’s writings, letters, declassified government files, and documents and essays that focus on King’s murder and the half century of change after King’s murder. This includes an assessment of " King Versus Trump" and “What if King Had Lived?”

50 Years Later: Why the Murder of Dr. King Still Hurts is not just another of the countless tributes to and reminiscences on the legacy of Dr. King,” says Hutchinson, “It takes a hard look at the murder, the tumult, and the changes both good and bad that his murder directly and indirectly caused in the nation, then and now.”

Hutchinson seeks to provide a political signpost where Dr.  King would have taken America if he had lived and where the country still should go. “This is more than a book of remembrance,” notes Hutchinson, “it’s a book that seeks to tell why Dr. King’s murder still hurts a half century later.”

Author Bio

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of multiple books on race and politics in America. The most recent include; The Obama Legacy, The Trump Challenge to Black America, and From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History. He is a regular commentator on RT News with Ed Schultz and other cable network shows. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

"Then There Was Joe" kicks off Arkansas Cinema Society's Homegrown Film Series

LITTLE ROCK, AR – Then There Was Joe, a full-length, comedy feature film written, produced, directed, co-edited and starring Little Rock native Justin Warren and based on Warren’s own family, will be the first film showcased by the Arkansas Cinema Society’s new Homegrown Film Series. The series was created to give Arkansas filmmakers a venue, and a voice, in their home communities.

A screening of Then There Was Joe will take place at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 3 at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave. in Little Rock. Admission was $12, but the screening is currently SOLD OUT !!! To get on a waiting list, please email info@arkansascinemasociety.org. After the screening and discussion, an afterparty will be held at the nearby Stickyz Rock ‘N’ Roll Chicken Shack, 107 River Market Ave.

A question-and-answer panel following the film will include Warren and the film’s co-star, Ray Grady. Grady, a Chicago comedian and actor, is a veteran of various comedy shows including The Next Level, Season One; Martin Lawrence Presents: First Amendment Stand-Up and Comic View. He was also in the 2015 movie Goddess of Love.

Also starring in the film is James “Butch” Warren (White Lightning, CNN Presents Black in America: The Black Man) and T. Dion Burns (Drumline, Jeremy Brooks) as well as veteran actress Natalie Canerday (Biloxi Blues, One False Move, Sling Blade, October Sky, Walk the Line). James M. “Butch” Warren and William L. "Billy" Rutledge, M.D., are executive producers of the film.

Then There Was Joe is a tale of brotherly love and forgiveness with a twist: An upstanding young man needs to study for the bar exam, but must babysit his criminal, legally homebound older brother instead. Will he be able to keep his sanity and keep his brother out of trouble?

Warren portrays harried law student Ben Hazelstein, who is shopping for an engagement ring for his girlfriend when he’s rudely interrupted by a breaking TV-news story: brother Joe (Grady) has been arrested for robbing a bowling alley full of birthday-partying third-graders! When Joe goes from jail to house arrest, the young men’s father, the widowed Judge Roy Hazelstein (Warren’s real-life father, James “Butch” Warren) orders Ben to keep an eye on his brother as he awaits his court date. The brothers’ tangled relationship plays out hilariously.

A graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts, Justin Warren wrote Then There Was Joe a year out of film school. Two producers for a major Atlanta film mogul wanted to option the script, but wanted to make too many changes. Warren ultimately decided to do the film himself with the goal of making a high-quality product with a low budget, a goal that, viewers will see, was fully realized.

After the screening, the movie will be available for pre-order at www.ThenThereWasJoe.com.

                                                               

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