The major events of the civil rights movement are well known: Montgomery. Selma. Birmingham. But cities like Fresno and Bakersfield were also dealing with the same issues of racial injustice and inequality. Today on KVPR\u2019s Central Valley Roots the story of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s visit to Bakersfield.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s go back to February 25, 1960. King had just moved to Atlanta<\/a> from Montgomery to run the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and to be more involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With those big changes underway, he flew to California for a series of meetings and speeches, including one at Bakersfield\u2019s Harvey Auditorium. <\/p>\n In Bakersfield, King led a march<\/a> from Lowell Park, down Chester Avenue<\/a> to the Bakersfield High School campus. Participants in the march met with opponents, who reportedly threw bottles and bricks<\/a> at the marchers, but the march and King\u2019s speech went on. Unfortunately, the text, or even an account of King\u2019s Bakersfield speech doesn\u2019t exist today. <\/p>\n Roughly four years later, King would return to the Central Valley, leading a march and rally in Fresno against discrimination in housing. More on that in another episode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The major events of the civil rights movement are well known: Montgomery. Selma. Birmingham. But cities like Fresno…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":{"0":"post-135506","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bakersfield","8":"tag-bakersfield","9":"tag-bakersfield-headlines","10":"tag-bakersfield-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}