Police Attack on Martin Luther King Celebration

On January 21, twenty minutes after a Martin Luther King Day celebration was supposed to end, police officers in Lake Wales, Florida began shooting tear-gas and pepper balls into a crowd without warning. Captain Pat Quinn said the target was a group of “500 to 600 children.”

There was no fighting, no violence, no problems, until the police fired into the crowd. What provoked the attack? Officer Velazquez said one group had “started using profanity.”

This is back in the news today because the Lake Wales chapter of the NAACP has filed a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Apparently, officers wore gas guns around their necks during the King Day celebration, but not at the all-day Mardi Gras event the city hosted this year on February 2, an event which had more than 20,000 in attendance. The annual Mardi Gras event, incidentally, draws a much larger crowd of white Americans than does the King Day celebration.

Capt. Quinn stated this is not a black-white issue.

So here, then, is the issue: Mardi Gras, an event which lasts late into the night, beginning with a parade, costumes, continues with live music, beer gardens, and where drinking is encouraged and profitable to the city and local businesses, was treated by the police as a family-friendly event and party-goers were allowed to roam the streets of the city’s quaint downtown at will; versus, a community celebration of a martyred pacifist who was assassinated for a controversial message of civil rights for blacks in America, which was squelched twenty minutes after 8 p.m. by the same weapons used against demonstrators in the 1960s, whose message of equality made the status-quo uptight then, and apparently now, as well.

Read the full article in today’s Lakeland Ledger, here: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080219/BREAKING/673770353