Pants on the Ground and MLK

This week on American Idol, 62-year-old novelty rapper General Larry Platt upstaged all the "real" singers on the Atlanta auditions episode with his instantly viral hit, "Pants On The Ground." But Platt is not just some William Hungian TV clown angling for 15 minutes of YouTube fame. His real legacy in fact extends all the way back to the '60s, when he was a teenage crusader for the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia.

Platt was actually a student of Martin Luther King Jr. back in the day, which makes the timing of his sudden fame quite interesting, given that next Monday is MLK Day. In the early '60s when he was only 16 (see the 16-year-old Platt in the photograph here; he's the one on the far left), he worked with activist groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference to fight racial segregation in the South. He was even beaten while participating in the infamous "Bloody Sunday" protest march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama.

Posted Thu Jan 14, 2010 1:53pm PST by Lyndsey Parker in Reality Rocks