Southern Poverty Law Center
In our time with Andrew at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Civil Rights Memorial, our group seemed to be stricken with multiple emotions as a reaction to the memorial. I was amazed by the beautiful tribute to the many people who lost their lives in the struggle to obtain equal rights for not only African Americans in the south, but the people who have died as a result of hatred for what is not known or understood. I was seriously brought to tears when I was reading the stories of the people who have been murdered in cold blood since the Civil Rights movement because they were different from their killers and that was the only reason that these people were murdered.
The attention that was drawn to groups not only in the United States, such as the victims of the Darfur genocide and the Holocaust, is something that we all know about, but that many of us tend to overlook in the question of equal rights for all people. America is known as the land of the free and home of the brave, but if we, as a nation, are unable to secure what we consider to be basic freedoms forty years after the civil rights movement and after we have had so much legislation to go through to secure these rights, then what hope do we have to show the rest of the world?
The walk across the bridge in Selma was very surreal to me to know the pain and suffering that took place at the foot of the bridge where so many people were just trying to get to their right to vote. Something that Dr. Hattery brought up that I have continued to think about was the fact that the people that organized in Selma were not just wanting the right to vote, but that these were impoverished people who needed to have a voice because there were no politicians standing up for their rights.