The Day I Always Remember on This Day

The Day I Always Remember on This Day

© Carlos Raúl Dufflar 12/4/2020

Even after six generations of past life, struggling for a new future in the community for housing fit for a human being, food for the people, job training, income, jobs, justice, against police brutality. 

The Harlem Rent Strike of 1963, the Great Student Boycott of 1964, it was the age of consciousness. The SNCC and the Freedom Schools that taught us people’s history and science.

I was one of the few high school students to join and become an organizer, to organize the students for their rights and real people’s history from the negative narrative against the abuse of poor people and against the war in Vietnam. 

So when the word was given by a friend that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would speak at the Riverside Church. Many times I have passed the Riverside Church but until April the 4th, 1967, when I walked in and sat down and waited for him to speak. “A Time to Break Our Silence Beyond Vietnam.” It was a moment of joy that opened my heart. 

A few months passed by and we were marching for peace and bring the troops home now. But the poor were dying in greater numbers in the battlefield. 

When the people rose like a mighty storm in Newark and Detroit and across the country. 

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called SCLC staff conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on December the 4th, 1967, he called for a Poor People’s Campaign to unite all poor people of Indigenous, Puerto Rixans, Blacks, and Appalachian poor whites, and to create a new city to rise of poor people – Resurrection City. 

For our demands against exploitation, institutional racism, and the War in Vietnam,, and for jobs, a guaranteed income for all, education, food, and Indigenous fishing rights.

As we all called ourselves sisters and brothers.

And this is history that can never be erased.