Happy MLK Day, everyone! Our protest will take place as planned, 2-4 p.m. at the site. The organizers of the march have also confirmed that the events are happening as planned. See you later today! Updated Monday, January 15, 8:40 a.m.

Southeast Texas friends, please join us on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 15 for the MLK Day March in Orange, Texas, followed by our protest of the newly built Neo-Confederate memorial on MLK Dr.

The Orange chapter of the NAACP will be leading the historic MLK March beginning at 10 a.m. at Salem Church on W. John Ave. The parade will be followed by presentations at the Riverfront Boardwalk and Pavilion.

Click here for more information.

And then at 2 p.m., Repurpose Memorial will head over to the Neo-Confederate memorial on MLK Dr. at Interstate 10.

The monument is located across from the Exxon station on MLK Dr. at I-10: Google maps.

Parking is available at the Exxon station or on 41st St. (my blue Ford F150 pickup truck will be parked there).

We will be on the corner with our signs (and water bottles) from 2-4 p.m.

For those who aren’t familiar with the insidious efforts of white supremacists and Neo-Confederates to make hateful iconography unavoidable, please check out this recent reel by musician and activist Dara Tucker.

Heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who donated to our GoFundMe campaign to raise an MLK billboard across from the monument in time for MLK Day. The billboard will continue to appear throughout Black History Month (February).

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns: jparzen@gmail.com or (917) 405-3426.

Thank you for your support and solidarity! We hope to see you at the march or protest or hopefully both!

Jeremy Parzen
co-founder Repurpose Memorial

Click here to donate now to our campaign to raise an MLK billboard over the Neo-Confederate monument in Orange, Texas.

My wife Tracie Parzen and I have been organizing protests of the Neo-Confederate monument in Orange, Texas, where she grew up, for nearly seven years now.

As we have done each year since, we will be raising an MLK billboard across the road from the site, which includes numerous Confederate flags. The billboard will be in place throughout January, the month of MLK’s birth, and February, Black History Month.

It will stand over the eyesore of a monument, completed in 2017, on MLK Day (January 15) when we will celebrate the legacy of Dr. King as we voice our opposition to this monument to white supremacy (please join us; details forthcoming).

But this year’s protest will be different: since our last demonstration at the site in 2023, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the pseudo-Ku Klux Klan group that owns and manages this obscenity, HAVE RAISED THE FLAGPOLES SO THAT THEY ARE NOW VISIBLE FROM INTERSTATE 10.

The Sons (of bitches) were stymied by the City of Orange who passed a law setting the maximum height of flag displays on private property. And for the early years since the site’s completion, they couldn’t be seen from the freeway where more than 55k cars pass by daily.

But they have now raised them (the city’s office confirmed that they are still within the allowed height).

For those unfamiliar with the geography of Southeast Texas, the City of Orange is the first town on the Texas side of the border with Louisiana. It’s the gateway to Texas from the east. And for those traveling west, it’s the first thing that you notice as you enter the state.

This original rendering of the site shows the designers’ intentions (warning: contains offensive graphic material).

Texans, this is your fight, too. Don’t let the Memorial of the [Breaking] Wind be the welcome mat for our state!

Click here to donate now. Thank you for your support and solidarity.

Jeremy Parzen
co-founder
RepurposeMemorial.com
email me at jparzen@gmail.com

Please join us in PROTEST of the neo-Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas (at Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. and Interstate 10, north access road):

MLK Day
Monday, January 16, 2023
location:
Confederate Memorial of the Wind
(Google map)
time:
1-3 pm

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CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Since 2018, my wife Tracie and I have been organizing protests of the newly built Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas, where she grew up and where her family and much of her extended family still lives.

We will be at the site protesting on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 16, 2023 (please stay tuned for event details).

Every year since the site’s completion in 2017, we have raised billboards across the road that feature Dr. King and a quote from his writings and speeches. The image literally looks down over the memorial.

The monument was conceived and built by the Orange, Texas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It sits at the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and Interstate 10, just a few exits west of the Louisiana border.

Click here to see their flier promoting fundraising for construction (note that it contains offensive material).

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the people who built it intended for it to be an affront to the Black community in city that has a sordid legacy of racism and racist violence (just ask any Black Texan of a certain age and they will tell you how their parents told them to avoid Orange as they drove to or from New Orleans).

As in previous years, the billboard will begin to appear in the days leading up to MLK Day and throughout Black History Month (February).

We over-raised $910 in last year’s campaign and we have already applied that money to this year’s. The more money we can raise (in $1,000 increments), the longer the billboard will appear (it costs roughly $1,000 for four weeks). Currently, we are shooting for a total of $2,000 to reach our goal for this year. Right now, we only have $900 to go!

Any amount, no matter how small, matters. Even if you’re not able to donate, you can help to further our cause by sharing with friends and posting on social media.

There’s no legal means for us to get the Sons to repurpose the site. We can’t even get them to dialog with us. The site sits on private property and is protected by free speech standards.

But we have no intention of giving up our fight: at the very least, we will continue to show solidarity with the Black community in Orange and we will continue to remind the White supremacists that it’s no longer socially acceptable to display symbols of racism and racist violence. Their “Memorial of the Wind” is especially egregious because of how conspicuously it is displayed.

Please help us in our campaign by donating to our GoFundMe here. And please share with your networks. Every dollar, every share counts!

Thank you for your support and solidarity. We hope to see you on MLK Day in Orange!

Jeremy Parzen
Repurpose co-founder

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

As a chilly dawn breaks over Southeast Texas, a billboard with an image of Dr. King and one of his most famous quotes can be seen rising over eastbound Interstate 10, just a few miles west of the Louisiana border.

The image stands on MLK Dr., one of the main arteries of Orange, Texas where Tracie grew up and where we often visit our family with our children, ages 8 and 10.

Our girls, Georgia and Lila Jane, know a lot about Dr. King, his life and legacy. They know that only a generation ago he fought for all Americans to enjoy the freedoms of living in a democracy. They know that he ultimately gave his life in his ceaseless efforts to make our country a true democracy, one where all people, regardless of their color, could live without fear of authoritarian violence and suppression.

They know little of the insidious efforts of neo-Confederates like the Sons of Confederates Veterans who unveiled a newly built monument along MLK Dr. in Orange in the shadow of I-10 in 2017.

They know little of the Sons’ main propagandists, the Kennedy brothers, who sell their books on the Sons’ website — books like Was Jefferson Davis Right?, Rekilling Lincoln, and The South Was Right (also available on Amazon).

They know little of how their neo-Confederate foot soldiers, like the ones who raised the monument in Orange, claim to be merely celebrating their “heritage” and “history,” as they like to put it.

They know little of the historic, collective suffering the Black community in Orange has endured for generations since slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.

They know little of the pain that residents, Black and White, feel when they drive past the Sons’ neo-Confederate memorial when they drive to work each day.

Georgia and Lila Jane drove by those flags just a few months ago when they attended their great-grandmothers funeral. She worshipped at a church just a few miles up the road from the monument. Between the church and graveside services and then the reception that followed, they passed by the site four times. But they hardly know what those flags mean and what they represent to the people who live here.

They do know that their parents, with the help of generous donors, have raised the billboard that today appears across the road. They know that each year their family visits Orange on MLK Day to march in the city’s historic MLK Day parade (now on hold because of health concerns). They remember that they themselves have marched in that parade in years past.

Happy MLK Day! Please check out Jelani Cobb’s excellent essay for the New Yorker this week, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s History Lessons.”

Tracie and I share our heartfelt thanks with everyone who contributed to our Go Fund Me campaign to raise the billboard this year. It was first posted on Friday and will remain in place throughout Black History Month (February).

Jeremy Parzen
co-founder of Repurpose Repurpose Memorial

There will be no protest this MLK Day because of health concerns but please consider giving to our campaign to raise an MLK billboard overlooking the neo-Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas.

The billboard will be posted next Friday (before MLK Day) and will remain in place throughout February, Black History Month.

Thank you. And even if you can’t give, please consider sharing the GoFundMe on social media. Thank you for your support and solidarity.

Here’s the link. Thank you.

Earlier this month, RepurposeMemorial.com posted its latest billboard across from the newly built neo-Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas where Tracie grew up.

We are happy to report that “Black Lives Matter” currently looks down on the site from across the road.

Tracie and I launched RepurposeMemorial.com in January, 2018 (we began protesting the site in November 2017 after the neo-Confederates began displaying their flags there for the first time). Since that time, we have repeatedly asked the Sons of Confederate Veterans (the neo-Confederate and outwardly racist group behind the memorial) to enter into dialog with us about how the memorial could be repurposed (not torn down) to reflect community values in a city where nearly half the residents are black and where there is a sordid legacy of racist violence.

So far, the Sons have responded with threats of violence and trolling.

The billboard was made possible through our ongoing GoFundMe campaign. Thanks to the generosity of donors, we were able to secure the billboard for six months. This is the second billboard we’ve published since we inked our latest contract.

We hope to raise enough money to renew the contract by the time it expires in January, 2021 (right before Martin Luther King Day).

The “Confederate Memorial of the Wind” stands on Martin Luther King Dr., one of the city’s main arteries. Construction on the site began in 2015 and the neo-Confederates began displaying their flags there in late 2017 (not long after the notorious neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate march in Charlottesville, Virginia).

The response to the new billboard has been overwhelmingly positive.

Heartfelt thanks to Orange native designer Ashley Evans for creating the artwork and to Beaumont-based photographer Pete Churton for the photo above.

And thank you to everyone who contributed to our campaign: none of this would be possible without you!

Jeremy Parzen

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we have secured the billboard space across from the memorial for the next six months.

We plan to use new artwork every four weeks or so.

Thank you to everyone who made this possible.