By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The applause was loud and sustained virtually every moment that Yolanda King was on stage performing her one-woman theatrical performance. The audience beamed with love, joy and most importantly appreciation for her.
   This writer did too, as I sat spellbound in the first row of the Los Angeles church where King performed. The occasion was the annual King Day celebration last year held at a popular Los Angeles church.
    The audience didn’t embrace and idolize King solely because she was the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of those in the audience weren’t even born when King was alive. And the applause for her wasn’t solely out of a misty nostalgia for the civil rights movement. Most there had no first hand knowledge or involvement in the civil rights battles four decades ago.
    No, their applause and respect was for her, and her moving on-stage recapture of the pain, suffering, and sacrifice as well as the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Their sustained applause was also given out of deep appreciation for her impassioned crusade to keep Dr. King’s dream alive by actively opposing Bush’s wasteful and ruinous Iraq war, championing women and gay rights, and fighting for economic justice for the poor.
    In between her theatrical skits, she would pause take a deep breath, and in measured but passionate tones remind the audience that King’s dream still was unfulfilled. She in turn prodded, cajoled, and implored the audience that the best way to keep her father’s dream alive was to be active fighters for peace and social justice.
    Yolanda King understood that decades after the great civil rights battles of the 1960s blacks are still two and three times more likely to be unemployed than whites, trapped in segregated neighborhoods, and that their kids will attend disgracefully failing, mostly segregated public schools.
    Ever present is the reality that young black males and females are far more likely to be murdered, suffer HIV/AIDS affliction, to be racially-profiled by police, imprisoned, placed on probation or parole, permanently barred in many states from voting because of felony convictions, are much more likely to receive the death penalty especially if their victims are white, and are more likely to be victims of racially motivated violence than whites.