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Veteran of Danville’s ‘Bloody Monday’ to speak at King Day service

The memory of civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr. will be honored at a service Monday afternoon at The First United Baptist Church on Route 17, south of Gloucester Court House.

The annual Gloucester Union Relief Association of Missionary Baptist Martin Luther King Day Jr. Day Service will begin at 4 p.m. Monday, which would have been the 89th birthday for King. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Dr. Thurman O. Echols Jr., pastor of Danville’s Moral Hill Missionary Baptist Church and a man whose own history is intimately connected with the early days of the civil rights movement, will be the guest speaker.

 

A native of Danville, Echols was a 16-year-old high school student when he gathered about 60 of his fellow students in 1963 in what has subsequently been called “Bloody Monday.”

They walked to the city’s Municipal Building in one of a series of peaceful protest marches that had oc...

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