Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)and The Center for Peace and Justice

It rained last night and is continuing this morning. Scurrying through a downpour we entered the SPLC’s Civil Rights museum.

This is an organization that Marlina has supported for the last 35+ years. It’s nice to see where some of the donations have gone.

It is a beautiful building with a gracious staff. The rain was helpful in that we had the place almost to ourselves.

This is a place to honor some of the people who were killed by the KKK. It tells the story of what happened to them.

Often the killers were never pursued let alone caught or prosecuted.SPLC made it their mission to seek justice for many of them.

To read more I would recommend the book The Lynching. It shows the persistence that SPLC used to track down the killers.

We spent a good amount of time reading each of the accounts, you feel as if it is the least you can do,by reading each of the accounts. You might think of it,As draining,I come away with admiration for each of these people and keep asking what would I do? These are ordinary people, who just want to do well, who want to get to work,who want their children to go to a good school, who want their fellow citizens to be able to vote in a safe atmosphere. You can pass all the laws you want, you can get all the Supreme Court decisions in the world, it doesn’t matter a tinkers damn,if it isn’t implemented, that is what these citizens were doing, they were doing the ground work to get these laws implemented when they were killed.

The tactics they used were non violence Julian Bonds quote below summarizes it very well

In the afternoon we went to the Equal Justice Initiative’s ,Center for Peace and Justice and their National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This memorial is dedicated to all the victims of race based Lynching in the US.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow. InBryan Stevenson’s excellent book,Just Mercy he explains very clearly, how ,so frequently Black men, women and children were victims of a very racist and corrupt judicial system.

Recently 40% of all executions IN THE US by death penalty were from Alabama ALONE.

Alabama makes up less than 2% of the US population

Until tomorrow

Paul