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In Memoriam Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, Sr. Wilhelmina J. Rolark THE WASHINGTON INFORMER NEWSPAPER (ISSN#0741-9414) is published weekly on each Thursday. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. News and advertising deadline is Monday prior to publication. Announcements must be received two weeks prior to event. Copyright 2013 by The Washington Informer. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send change of addresses to The Washington Informer, 3117 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave., S.E. Washington, D.C. 20032. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. The Informer Newspaper cannot guarantee the return of photographs. Subscription rates are $45 per year, two years $60. Papers will be received not more than a week after publication. Make checks payable to:
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REPORTERS
STAFF Denise W. Barnes, Editor Shantella Y. Sherman, Assistant Editor Ron Burke, Advertising/ Marketing Director Lafayette Barnes, IV, Assistant Photo Editor Khalid Naji-Allah, Staff Photographer John E. De Freitas, Sports Photo Editor Dorothy Rowley, Online Editor Brian Young, Design & Layout Mable Neville, Bookkeeper Mickey Thompson, Social Sightings columnist Stacey Palmer, Social Media Specialist Angie Johnson, Circulation
Stacy Brown, Sam P.K. Collins, Michelle Phipps-Evans, Eve Ferguson, Gale Horton Gay, Elton J. Hayes, Njunga Kabugi, Stacey Palmer, Dorothy Rowley, Barrington Salmon, Margaret Summers, Charles E. Sutton, James Wright
The
Blueprint J
ust months before Dr. King’s assassination, he had the opportunity to sit with young people and field their questions about race, fear, and the future. A conscientious and kind man, Dr. King eventually turned the tables on the group of middle school students and inquired of them: What is Your Life’s Blueprint? Asked less to evoke an answer than to encourage self-reflection, the question intimates that every life, while preordained a rational number of successes and setbacks, ought to have as its foundation, a blueprint. This text is of particular consequence as hard fought battles for social and racial equality sit stoically unattended and crumbling before our eyes. The slow and deliberate gentrification of neighborhoods through economic (tax) displacement has signaled a call to the starting gates for intolerance, segregation, and stereotypes of race and class superiority. Those who love justice will not allow the tyranny of the past an opportunity to traipse back en vogue into the lives of their children and grandchildren. If all your people gave you was a sense of entitlement, it’s time you taught yourself how to speak up, speak out, and fight back. Globally the stages are set to welcome home angry and bitter policies of discrimination, based on race, class, economic, and religious or tribal differences. So overwhelming does the horizon appear that many good and sound people have stopped speaking up and speaking out. They’d rather not be labeled troublemakers… As key components to the Voting Rights Act have been struck down, Black youth have been largely abandoned as unsalvageable, and Black homeowners struggle to recover from the devastation of an unjust lending system, the collective attentions of those who need to speak up and speak out have been averted to the latest fight or glop of tomfoolery trending on WorldStarHipHop. Utilizing the texts of Dr. King’s In a Single Garment of Destiny and A Time to Break Silence, the Washington Informer challenges its readers to re-examine their individual blueprints for life. What is it that you want out of life? For what are you prepared to battle? Are you prepared to speak up and speak out for justice no matter the consequence? Dr. King told those students that “If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley. But be the best little scrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush is you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be the sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are.” It’s late in the day… time to ‘be’ something other than quiet. Read & Think,
PHOTOGRAPHERS John E. De Freitas, Roy Lewis, Khalid Naji-Allah, Shevry Lassiter
Shantella Y. Sherman Editor, Special Editions
M-2 /January 2014 / MARTIN LUThER KING JR SUPPLEMENt
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