By KRWG News
Albuquerque – Organizers for a planned Martin Luther King Jr. center for Albuquerque hope the facility will also introduce area residents to largely forgotten civil rights leaders from New Mexico.
Jewel Hall, president of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center Board, plans to hold events on leaders like Mexican-American pioneer educator George I. Sanchez and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche.
The Albuquerque-born Sanchez was a key early civil rights advocate for Latinos and later president of LULAC.
Bunche, who attended school in Albuquerque as a child, won the 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace for successfully negotiating an Arab-Israeli truce and was later active in civil rights marches in Alabama.
Organizers recently unveiled a master plan for the proposed center and are currently looking for land.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.