The niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said her uncle would likely offer one piece of overriding advice to the University of Missouri protesters: “We all must learn to live together as brothers (and I add as sisters) or perish as fools.”
In an interview with USA Radio News’ Russ Jones, Dr. Alveda King referenced the Bible verse Acts 17:26 as a crucial fact all should keep in mind when considering people of different races. “The communities across America, including at Mizzou, [the Bible] says we are one blood, one human race, so we have the ability and the capacity to love each other as brothers and sisters and to conduct ourselves accordingly,” the minister and Georgia state representative told Jones.
“My uncle Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, ‘We all must learn to live together as brothers (and I add as sisters) or perish as fools,'” she added. “It’s wrong to charge us with racism when we simply want to educate young people.” Listen to her remarks below:
As reported by Western Journalism, Jones is an alumni of the University of Missouri and was dismayed to see the school undergoing such turmoil earlier this month. “This is not the beloved Mizzou many know,” he said. “How are administrators, and the nation for that matter, supposed to take seriously issues of discrimination when the facts seem to say something very different?”
Jones founded the group TruthsMattersMU to examine and challenge some of the claims being made by Concerned Student 1950, the campus group which spearheaded the Mizzou protests. Truth Matters wants to provide a space for “a rational and reasoned response to racial tensions on the campus.”
According to the TruthMattersMU Facebook page, some of the facts it believes are true include:
-President Tim Wolfe was falsely accused and should not have resigned.
-Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin should not have stepped down.
-1st Amendment rights are being threatened.
-Protests are creating further division rather than embrace diversity.
-Questions there is system-wide racism at the University of Missouri
The TruthMattersMU’s page was briefly shut down by Facebook for “hate speech” according to Jones. Truth Matters stated it received a notice from the social media company stating, the page did not “follow the Facebook Terms and Community Standards.”
The notification read: “While people can use Facebook to challenge ideas, institutions, and practices, Facebook removes hate speech. Hate speech includes content that directly attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases.”
Truth Matters appealed and Facebook reversed its decision calling it an “accident.” Jones told the News Tribune that the company probably meant “mistake.”
“He suspects groups or individuals supporting the MU protesters complained about the page, and it might have been automatically taken down without anyone from Facebook looking to see whether it indeed violated any policy,” the Tribune reported.
“We used the Facebook speech tools to restrict incendiary terms that could be considered hate speech,” said Jones. “What seems absolutely clear is that there is a cultural movement to restrict intellectual honesty.”