Willie Mukasa Ricks, former SNCC field secretary, with Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, at the Truth Bookstore in Detroit on Jan. 15, 2011. (Photo: PANW)
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Willie Mukasa Ricks first raised the black power slogan in the Delta
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
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Detroit held its 8th Annual MLK Day Rally & March at Central United Methodist Church on Jan. 17 under the theme of renewing the fight for Jobs, Peace and Justice. The keynote speaker for the event was Willie Mukasa Ricks, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who was a civil rights worker in Tennessee, Alabama and Tennessee during the 1960s.
Ricks, who has a son studying at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba, began his address by raising the slogan of Black Power in a similar fashion as it was advanced in Mississippi in June 1966. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), Floyd McKissick and others decided to continue a 240 mile demonstration against fear of racist violence after James Merideth, the first African American to study at the University of Mississippi, was shot down while walking through the state on June 6.
Ricks, who began his career as an activist during his teenage years in Chatanooga, Tennessee, was described by Dr. King as the most fiery orator in SNCC. Ricks played a significant role in the Selma to Montgomery march of March 1965, when he organized students at Alabama State to defy the State Troopers who were under the command of the then Gov. George Wallace.
Later he would be one of the early members of the Black Panther Party of Alabama in 1965-66 which later influenced Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to form the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, Calif. Ricks was also a founding member of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and served for many years on its Central Committee along with Kwame Ture.
At the Jan. 17 rally in Detroit, Mukasa said that he did not want to be viewed as a revolutionary from the 1960s but "someone who is still commited to revolution today." After a rousing speech to a standing room only crowd inside the Church where Dr. King delivered annual sermons for ten consecutive years, Muskasa led the march through downtown that passed the Detroit Auto Show at Cobo Conference Center and through the financial district of Detroit.
The march in Detroit was initiated by the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) in 2004 in order to reclaim the anti-war and social justice legacy of Dr. King, who was martyred in Memphis on April 4, 1968. MECAWI immediatelly expanded the participation in the event by establishing the Detroit MLK Committee which plans the event every year.
Two Detroit MLK Spirit of Detroit awards were given this year to the Warriors on Wheels, a people living with disabilities rights organization and the Detroit Local Organizing Committee (DLOC) for the U.S. Social Forum that was held in the city and attracted 15,000 people from across the country and the world.
A special tribute to Rev. Dr. Lucius Walker, the founder of the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organizations (IFCO), featured City Council member JoAnn Watson and Ellen Bernstein, Co-Director of IFCO and Pastors for Peace. Both Mukasa and Bernstein spoke the following day at the University of Michigan on the scholarship program established by IFCO, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Cuban government to provide scholarships to students from oppressed communities interested in studying medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba.
Co-sponsors and endorsers of the Detroit MLK Day Rally and March included the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, Mosaic Design Group, the Justice for Cuba Coalition, the Palestine Office, among others.
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