A.G. Gancarski
Jacksonville’s Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Breakfasts have been a tradition for almost three decades. In recent years, speakers have included Marc Morial, Soledad O’Brien, Andrew Young, and Bernice King.
As many major cities have MLK Birthday Breakfasts, planning has already started, and there’s a short list of candidates emerging. According to public record emails, three candidates are undergoing preliminary consideration.
Diane Nash, a civil rights movement activist from the struggles of the 1960s, is one of the names under consideration. One would suspect that she won’t be chosen, given her quote about why she didn’t participate in the commemorative Selma march of 2015.
“I refused to march because George Bush marched,” Nash, an architect of the 1965 march, said. “I think the Selma movement was about nonviolence and peace and democracy. And George Bush stands for just the opposite: For violence and war and stolen elections, and his administration … had people tortured.”
“So I thought that this was not an appropriate event for him,” she said.
A less controversial choice might be the first African-American woman to travel in space, Mae Jemison.
Her politics are more of a private matter. A Dartmouth professor and former Peace Corps volunteer, Jemison has made it her life’s work to bring technology to developing countries.
The third name is the most high profile of this preliminary short list: Henry Louis Gates. Gates has had a varied life full of accomplishments, including books of cultural and literary criticism that laid the groundwork for new generations of scholars. He is director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, and is best known these days for his PBS series Finding Your Roots, which is on hiatus after a kerfuffle involving Ben Affleck.
Gates “violated PBS standards by failing to shield the creative and editorial process from improper influence, and by failing to inform PBS or WNET [the PBS member station where the program originates] of Mr. Affleck’s efforts to affect program content,” according to a PBS Review.
He also is famous for being part of the Beer Summit with President Barack Obama. After Gates called the police because his house had been burglarized, the officer who reported to the scene arrested the Harvard professor. A nationwide uproar ensued, and the Beer Summit was an attempt to symbolically defray tensions.
