Black Queer state senator of Stone Mtn Ga and Cowpens SC kicks off Furman King Weekend

     Kim Jackson of the class of 2006 of Furman University spoke virtually this morning for about 15 minutes. She says she walked into her calling as an Episcopal Priest, activist and politician her Freshman year at Furman at the Invitation of my friend Jim Pitts the Furman Chaplain for forty years and early days with LD Johnson.

     Jackson arrived on campus when Greenville still didnt celebrate ML King day. She participated in the protest marches of the early oughts.

    She now represents Stone Mtn Ga, the birthplace of the Klan, lit up after the Lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. Steve Oney wrote the definitive work on that lynching and it was the subject of the last review in the New York Rev of Books by Marshall Frady, FU 63. Whether Kim knows that or not I dont know, but it wouldnt have hurt to mention that along with her salute to Jim Pitts.

   I hope by now Jackson as her star rises has mastered the information of Patrick Phillips and his book on the Frank contemporary lynchings in Forsyth County Georgia, the stomping grounds of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Q anon fame.

   Pitts on errand from Will D Campbell spoke at Frady's Funeral while Jackson was at Furman, North Augusta SC with Jesse Jackson the main eulogist. And Frady is the author of a beautiful biography of King I quote from in my review of the latest Bio of King by Paul Harvey.

    I hope Kimberly has these books in her personal library as well as Ms Kogens at the Riley Institute.

    In Cowpens SC, Kim Jackson was in the immediate vicinity of the summers of Marian Wright Edelman whose grandfather was pastor of the Thicketty Baptist Church on the Spartanburg County and Cherokee County lines. MWE a mentor and hero of Hillary Clinton whose praises Bobby Kennedy shared with his children on one of his early trips to Mississippi in the sixties where MWE showed him the face of Black poverty.

   I was raised ten miles further east from 62 to 78 in Gaffney.

      I hope Kim Jackson knows all of this as she fights the Trump GOP in Georgia with Ralphael Warnock and I hope the Riley Institute makes her message plain to William Timmons of Christ Church Episcopal in Greenville whose family name is on the Basketball arena.

     One of Jackson's more powerful remarks for more diversity at Furman was a challenge not to judge people of color not only by their ability to play sports, but by all aspects of their character. 

     That goes beyond SC and Georgia all the way to Nick Saban as we must hope his conscience is quickened to make clear to Katie Britt, the hand chosen successor of Richard Shelby, a legend of the University of Alabama, Jesus is not pleased when Ms Britt distorts the legacy of King invoking his name in her perverted weaponization of political race theory for political power.

    So God Bless Ms Jackson and her platform and the many decades she has to honor Jim Pitts, Frady, LD Johnson, Tomiko Brown Nagin, Steve Oney and many others of Furman far and wide and her incarnation of the work of Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ.