Harris Wofford: Back to Birmingham: Today, the 45-year anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a good time to remember the historic events in Birmingham that started 50 years ago in that city which became the crucible of the civil rights crusade King led in the middle of the 20th century.
And on that date now, in 2013, it's an honor to be going back to Birmingham with Alma Powell, the chair of the America's Promise Alliance. She is returning to her hometown to launch a new stage of the campaign for children and youth that Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton started, with General Colin Powell as chair, at the Presidents' Summit in Philadelphia in 1997.
I write as one who was in at the beginning of that campaign for the Five Promises pledged to youth at the Summit in Philadelphia, and before that as one deeply involved in the civil rights movement after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, and its growth in significant part by Martin Luther King's turn to the Gandhian strategy of non-violent direct action.
