I’m looking forward to going to Atlanta next week with other members of the Boggs board.

 We’ve been invited to speak to Vincent Harding’s Morehouse College class on “The Last Years of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America.”

 Dr. Harding created this class in order to introduce Morehouse students and other members of the Atlanta community to the direction that MLK was taking in his post March-on-Washington years, especially his continuing call for “a revolution of values” and the struggle against the “triple evils” of racism, materialism and militarism.

 He has invited speakers whom he views as seeking to carry on the unfinished work of King in creating a multiracial democratic American nation.

 His guests this semester have included urban planner Emmanuel Pratt and his Sweetwater Foundation co-workers in Milwaukee and Chicago; Bob Moses and his daughter, Maisha, sharing their work with the Algebra Project and the Young Peoples Project; Nelson and Joyce Johnson from the Beloved Community Project in Greensboro, N.C.; Phillip Jackson from the Black Star Project in Chicago; James Douglass, major historian of the assassinations of Gandhi, Malcolm and King;

Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse; Michelle Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow, and Sister Helen Prejean, leading death penalty abolitionist.

      They have also included Zoharah Simmons, Harding’s long-time coworker from SNCC, the American Friends Service Committee and Nation of Islam experience. Zoharah, a SNCC volunteer in the 1960s when she was a teenager, is now a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a member of a Sufi Moslem community and a historian of the Freedom Movement.

      The class challenges Morehouse students and other Atlanta citizens to consider their role in the creation of a new future for our nation.

      As Detroiters who organized last October’s historic gathering on Re-imagining Work in the Motor City, we will be sharing the Visionary Organizing we have been doing to help Detroit, a majority African American city, become the national and international symbol of a 21st Century post-industrial society.

     We will be emphasizing the important role that the new informational technology can play in helping local communities produce for our own needs, thus becoming self-reliant and freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the factory assembly line and globalization.

      This is a mode of production whose time has come because it can play a significant role in bringing about the radical revolution of values advocated by MLK .

      About 30 young men are registered in Dr. Harding’s class but we will be speaking to a larger and more diverse audience because he has opened the class up to interested members of the Atlanta community as well as to students and faculty from other institutions. The setting will be interactive and dialogical. .

 Invincible is coming with us to convey, as only a rap artist can, the excitement of a city in {r} evolution.

 Early this month we were in the Bay Area. Last weekend Detroiters participated in the New Left Forum meeting in New York City.

 In April we’ll be in New York again, speaking at Cooper Union and the New School.   

 Thus, step by step, we’re sharing what Detroit is contributing to the Next American Revolution and also getting a sense of what is taking place in other regions of our country .