Today’s post is dedicated to my good friend MaQuettia Ledet (above). She and I first met in 2018 when the local chapter of the NAACP had just begun to revive the historic Orange, Texas MLK Day March.

Today, she is the chapter’s vice president and she has grown the event with fantastic results. By my count, there were 200 people at yesterday’s presentation (a far cry from the handful of people who came out in 2018); the speakers were all compelling and engaging and the music was fantastic.

In just seven years, she took a moribund but cherished tradition and has transformed it into a living, breathing agent of community support. She was the mistress of ceremonies at yesterday’s event and man, it was just super.

I was asked to give a short talk about “protecting freedom.” I told the story of Fannie Lou Hamer and how her power as an orator was a key step in bringing about the Voting Rights Act.

That campaign included the now famous quote: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?”

In 1971, she called out the newly founded National Women’s Political Caucus for not including issues faced by Black women in their platform.

That’s the speech that gave the historic civil rights movement one of its most iconic battle cries: “Now, we’ve got to have some changes in this country. And not only changes for the black man, and only changes for the black woman, but the changes we have to have in this country are going to be for liberation of all people — because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

I closed my talk by noting that as long as people are dying in ICE custody (the third person to die in custody this year, detained in Minneapolis, had passed the night before) no one in this country is truly free.

It’s what MLK called the “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Thank you for reading and thank you for observing and celebrating MLK Day. What are we doing for Black History Month “on purpose,” as my friend Annette likes to say?