Well this is certainly a piece of Kentucky history that I’d never heard about.
The Louisville Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional
Journalists is co-sponsoring a public forum on the First Amendment and the
struggle for civil rights in Kentucky. The program called
“Remembering Louisville in the 1960s: Freedom Fighters, Police Repression
and the Right to Free Speech” will be held at Horrigan Hall on the campus
of Bellarmine University at 6:30-pm on Wednesday, November 11.The forum is free and open to the public. Mike Honey and Martha Allen, who
worked with Louisville civil rights activists Carl and Anne Braden during the
1960s and 70s, will be on the panel. Honey and Allen were jailed in
Kentucky after writing a protest letter about the pending trial of a group of
African Americans known as The Black Six. Police arrested the six at a
protest rally in Louisville following the assassination of the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. During the riots that followed, a black teenager was
killed by police. Honey and Allen sent a protest letter to residents of
Munfordville claiming the Black Six were innocent. Because of that, they were
jailed for jury tampering. Based on their First Amendment rights, they
were eventually acquitted. But their trial set legal precedent in federal
courts against unwarranted prosecutions. The forum is also sponsored by
Bellarmine University Interdisciplinary Core, the Thomas Merton Center and the
Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Mike Honey will be on State of Affairs today at 1 and repeated at 9. He’ll be talking about how Dr. King, Jr. tied the civil rights movement to the labor rights & economic justice movement. Should be good!