Patrice Lumumba, 07.02.1925-01.17.1961, Congo's first elected Prime Minister, assassinated January 17, 1961 in Elizabethville, Republic of Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).	Dr. Martin Luther King, 01.15.1929-04.04.1968, assassinated April 4, 1968, assassinated April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee.

By Ann Garrison, Wuyi Jacobs, Claude Gatebuke, Kambale Musavuli, Didas Gasana, Charles Kabonero, Milton Allimadi, Mugume Rwakaringi, Delphin Kyubwa, Eric Kamba, David Barouski, Keith Harmon Snow, Peter Erlinder, Mesha Monge Irizarry, and Mary and Willie Ratcliff

The U.S.A.’s Martin Luther King Holiday, today, is also the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The U.S.A. should now, during the presidency of Barack Obama, finally apologize for its role in Lumumba’s assassination.

The USA should also stop supporting African dictatorships who are suppressing the basic voting rights that King fought for here, in the South, including Museveni’s Ugandan regime, Kagame’s Rwandan regime, and Kabila’s Congolese regime. Yesterday was the one year anniversary of Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza’s return to Rwanda, to run for president, and, for that, she remains in Kigali’s 1930 max security prison, as does Bernard Ntaganda. Last week Kabila changed Congolese election law to make a fair election even less likely and, though Uganda seems to be having something like a real election, with real candidates on the campaign trail, press are being arrested and Museveni has threatened to arrest presidential candidate Kizza Besigye if he publishes his own exit polls. As Milton Allimadi wrote, in the Black Star News:

“This is abominable and harkens to the days when here in the United States, elections used to be held in the Southern States while Black voters were either barred from voting, being lynched, being “disappeared,” or showered with water cannons.”

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Sincerely,
Ann Garrison
Independent Journalist,
415-287-4259
cell: 415-240-2761