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I turned on the kitchen radio on a recent January morning to hear the headlines from an hourly news broadcast and I nearly barfed up my breakfast as the announcer stated:

"Today the nation marks the birthday celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his efforts to bring racial unity and harmony . . ."

What gets my anger boiling is when the thought police try to both sanitize and trivialize the profound and courageous struggles of leaders along with people organizing in their local neighborhood issues.

My memory of Dr. King was that he was involved in local organizing beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott and ending when he was gunned down in Memphis while he was marching with striking city sanitation workers.

My memory of Dr. King was that he was grounded in non-violent direct action which he used to challenge the people in power - never doing it alone - but taking immediate action and going into the streets with thousands of his friends.

My memory of Dr. King was he was told by nearly all of the mainline Christian and Jewish religious leadership that he was neither welcomed nor needed in Birmingham, Ala. They signed a full-page newspaper advertisement to tell him to stay out - that patience was needed, things were really not that bad and they were dealing with race relations.

This effort to sanitize our thought and memory reminds me of a practice done years ago by hotel and motel maids. After cleaning they would place paper strips around the toilet seats, which had printed on them: "Sanitized for your safety and health".

The same type of "sanitizing" has happened and continues to happen with our work in neighborhood organizing - both locally and nationally.

Years ago, when I was doing neighborhood organizing in Cleveland, Ohio, many of the so-called urban crisis gurus - along with foundations - viewed neighborhood based organizing as a means to an end. Organizing was funded as it was seen a merely a first phase, which would end and evolve into the real tool of neighborhood revitalization - the community development corporation.

Today's urban hot shots, such as the former Governor of the Federal Reserve, Larry Lindsey have written articles that "noisy protest" is a thing of the past and now the reputation of professional "community development" is "demeaned every time one of these bad apples scores a political or financial hit."

"What is a politician to think of the community development industry when his only experience is people littering his front lawn and threatening his wife? What is a banker to think of the integrity of the people in our industry when his colleagues' experience is that they are extortionists?" continued Lindsey. It's my view that these politicians or bankers should rehearse their own history with NPA over the last 30 years. If they did, it would result in them sitting down at the negotiating table to hammer out a deal with those who are truly the experts on what is needed in the neighborhoods - the people who live, work or worship in those neighborhoods.

Some people say that it was our research that fueled our victories, but I remember these reforms were instituted several years ago when we took the study results along with 2,000 people from the NPA neighborhoods to the front door of HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo's tony McClean, Va. home. Cuomo was in denial at that time and even tried to shout over Gale Cincotta and T.C. Calvert that they were wrong and misleading the people - "I'm trying to help your people buy a home for the first time." He was drowned out by the jeering and booing.

Surprisingly after we visited his home, HUD and FHA seemed to be more open about negotiating a deal around what needed to be done in various neighborhoods across the county. Since that time countless national meetings and phone calls with FHA Commissioner Bill Apgar have taken place.

The word sanitize is rooted in the Latin word for "health". NPA is carrying on the legacy of Dr. King by attending to the health of our nation by organizing and kicking ass. It's all of our jobs to remember our history and tell our stories so that the "thought police" don't succeed in "sanitizing" our work and victories.