What's REALLY Going ON Volume 1, June 2014 Issue #6 | Page 84

ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Michael Inspires True Pride by Elizabeth Olney
The team is especially grateful to those individuals who gave
many hours of their time for this mission. Jen also led dedicated friends and fans to quietly demonstrate outside of the
school with a banner and the petition. Concurrently, Michelle
kept tabs on all expenses including the printing of flyers, a
banner, pamphlets, letters and the binding of them. Catherine continued to prompt the progression of the team and
counseled fans as support for the teams’ efforts grew.

tion letters. Despite the opposition, the ladies insisted upon
always being courteous yet, this was the greatest struggle.
Blessy says, “What's important is to FOCUS on your goal
and not to be swayed by drama.”
As far as Principal Urbina was concerned, he had already
been disturbed by the boards remaining covered, prior to the
campaign. The problem was that Mr. Urbina’s hands were
tied by higher authorities. He brought up the issue to parents
and teachers at a parents night event and put the issue to a
vote. Mr. Urbina and Jennifer developed a rapport and
friendship with additional contact by telephone. He informed
Jen that the result of a vote was unanimous; in favor of having the boards removed.

There is no question that many MJ fans became angry that
Michael’s name had been covered when they found out. Rather than become discouraged, perseverance of this mission
intensified. Of course, the team members understood the
anger and continually implored fans to keep calm and to
write respectful letters. This was absolutely key to accomplishing the ultimate objective. Anger begets hate and hate
breeds hate so, we must always stand up to hate with love
as our motivator. For those having trouble addressing the
issue and unaccustomed to writing letters of this nature,
sample letters were posted at the Facebook group as
“discussions”. Catherine helped fans cope and always redirected focus on Michael’s love and love for him which was
ultimately the driving force of the mission. Team members
often thanked supporters personally and always had the
lines of communication open. As more and more letters
came in, a request was sent out for photos. The team felt
that all supporters should be acknowledged as part of the
effort. Ariel transferred the photos, from the groups’ eaddress and uploaded them to Facebook.

Efforts persisted to acquire media exposure in order to get
Michael’s name uncovered. As an old English proverb says,
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way”. A brief article came out
in the Examiner on March 18th. The big breaks came on
April 1st from ABC News. The reporter states in the video
that Michael Jackson “is still creating controversy”; how rudely ironic. The comment chosen for the end of the article is
also not complimentary. At least a major news outlet interviewed Jen, even though it’s the same one known notoriously and hated for promoting Martin Bashir’s slash edit of their
documentary about Michael.
Note that this video http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?
section=news/local/los_angeles&id=7363559 can be seen on
YouTube, with Greek subtitles as Europeans, Indian and
many more fans of the world engaged in the campaign.
A blog opened-up at Larry King Live the same day.
http://larrykinglive.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/01/fans-to-l-aschool-put-jacksons-name-back/
Though the media exposure helped promote the cause,
UMNGC had already succeeded in acquiring 2,000 users to
their web-site on their own. Later that month, Catherine was
interviewed for KFI news.

Meanwhile, Superintendent Cortines and LAUSD were refusing to acknowledge Jennifer or anyone else of the team.
They even pretended to ignore the enormous number of peti84