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Former aide to King will speak at gathering
By JON WILSON, Times Staff Writer
ST. PETERSBURG -- A veteran civil rights leader whose roots reach to the movement's pivotal 1960s era will be the keynote speaker at a Jan. 17 banquet honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A former aide to King, the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy's background includes chairing a congressional subcommittee that investigated King's assassination and speaking out forcefully against slavery in Sudan and the former apartheid regime in South Africa. He is more readily recognized for helping organize the 1963 March on Washington, at which King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech. "It was the fruits of what we called the Birmingham movement, which laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Fauntroy said Tuesday. "It took the whites-only signs down across Florida and across the South." Fauntroy, 69, also coordinated the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, which built support for that year's Voting Rights Act, another piece of landmark civil rights legislation. The banquet, which begins the King commemorative celebration week, starts at 7 p.m. at the Hilton Hotel, 333 First St. S. Tickets are $20 and are available at the Enoch Davis Center, 1111 18th Ave. S. For information, call the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 327-0085. Music and high stepping take over on Jan. 19, when the 18th annual MLK Drum Major for Justice Festival of Bands comes to Tropicana Field. The show starts at 5 p.m. On Jan. 20, the annual parade steps off at 1:15 p.m. from Third Avenue S before moving up Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) Street and marching east on Central Avenue. Fauntroy said his keynote speech will emphasize one of the classic King messages: the need to live in peace and unity. "Either we learn to live together as brothers and sisters on this planet, or we will perish together as fools," Fauntroy said, paraphrasing the text of one of King's speeches. "That message has been embraced by people of every creed and race and color on this planet," Fauntroy said. In 1961, When he was 29, Fauntroy was appointed by King to lead the Washington, D.C., branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization King established. "He was like a right hand (to King). Outside of (Ralph) Abernathy and (Fred) Shuttlesworth, you have Walter Fauntroy as one of his vested confidantes and lieutenants," said Sevell Brown, director of the SCLC's St. Petersburg branch. Fauntroy, who served as Washington, D.C.'s delegate to Congress from 1971 to 1991, helped secure passage of the King holiday bill in 1983. He remains on the SCLC national board and was its chairman from 1977 to 1995. A Baptist minister, Fauntroy has visited St. Petersburg several times, once in 1993 to urge voters to reject mayoral candidate Ernest Curtsinger, who was running after being fired from his job as police chief. Fauntroy also helped persuade the City Council to allow the 1989 King parade after a dispute about a bill the SCLC owed for the 1988 parade. And in 1991 he supported Brown's effort to establish a civilian review board for police actions.
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