AL.com
By Bob Lowry
January 15, 2010, 9:19PM
AUBURN -- The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a Huntsville native and icon in the 1960s civil rights movement, urged an Auburn University audience Friday night not to "sanitize" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s achievements.
Speaking at an event to mark King's birthday, Lowery said some have hijacked King's dream and used it and ensuing advancements in civil rights to, for example, try and derail affirmative action.
"I'm serious about the need to recapture the spirit of affirmative action," he said. "Affirmative action, in my mind, is not preferential treatment. It is intentional. It is being as intentional about closing the gap as we were about creating the gap."
And he said people today should not honor King as a missionary and ignore his mission. "We must not let them put Martin on this rotunda of sentimental irrelevancy and declare him a gloried social worker," he said. "I have nothing against social workers, but he was a militant, but nonviolent revolutionary."
Full Story: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/01/lowery_tells_auburn_audience_k.html
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