The Greene County Democrat

Tag: Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

  • Newswire: Civil Rights foot soldiers, Birmingham youth launch voting rights push

    Newswire: Civil Rights foot soldiers, Birmingham youth launch voting rights push

    By Staff, Alabama Political Reporter

    Civil Rights Movement foot soldiers will join Birmingham-area high school students Saturday in an intergenerational effort to defend voting rights and encourage civic participation.

    The effort will take place Saturday, June 27, beginning at 9 a.m., with phone banking at Foot Soldiers HQ, 1707 Fourth Avenue North, in Birmingham’s historic Fourth Avenue Business District. Participants will call residents to discuss the importance of voting and build support for renewed voting rights advocacy. Organizers are encouraging volunteers to bring a tablet or laptop.

    At the same time, about 30 Birmingham-area high school members of Phi Kappa Sigma High School Fraternity will gather at the Collegeville Community Center, 3029 29th Avenue West, for a community canvassing event. Students from Ramsay, Pleasant Grove, Minor, McAdory, Bessemer City, Clay-Chalkville, Hueytown and Parker high schools are expected to take part.

    The students will knock on doors and speak with residents about civic engagement, connecting a new generation of young Black leaders with veterans of the movement that helped change the nation.

    Organizers said the event is a response to ongoing efforts to restrict voting access and to the lasting effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which weakened key protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    The decision struck at the heart of the federal preclearance system, which had long required certain states and localities with histories of racial discrimination in voting to receive federal approval before changing election laws. For many voting rights advocates, the ruling marked a turning point in the modern fight over ballot access.

    Saturday’s effort is designed to show that the struggle for voting rights is an unfinished obligation.

    “There’s something powerful about seeing a foot soldier in their 70s and a 17-year-old student fighting for the same thing,” said Bryan Jenkins, fraternity adviser. “This isn’t history, this is now. Our foot soldiers fought too hard for the right to vote, and we can’t sit back and watch it being dismantled. We’re passing the torch to the next generation, and they’re ready to carry it.”

    The event is powered by The People’s Project, a collaborative community initiative led by neighborhood association presidents, activists, faith leaders and civil rights organizations. The group’s mission is to spur civic engagement and bring residents into the public life of their communities.

    For Birmingham, the symbolism is hard to miss.

    The city’s young people helped force America to confront the brutality of segregation during the Civil Rights Movement. Now, another generation of students is being asked to understand that the right to vote, once won, must still be protected.

    Saturday’s events will place those generations side by side: movement veterans who carried the fight before them and students being called to carry it forward.

    The Alabama Political Reporter is a daily political news site devoted to Alabama politics. We provide accurate, reliable coverage of policy, elections and government.

    Read the original article here

    Featured image: Protestors raising hands and a megaphone (iStock/Alabama Political Reporter)

  • Newswire: Angela Davis speaks In Birmingham on day she was supposed to receive award from Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

    Article and Photo by: Marika N. Johnson

    Angela Davis speaks with Imani Perry at Birmingham program

    A civil rights icon, Dr. Angela Davis spoke to a sold-out free event in Birmingham on Saturday, February 16, 2019,brought by a grassroots organization, The Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation. This event communicated her wisdom and words to a community of thousands of varied ethnicities and religious backgrounds.Her former Sunday school teacher anddriving force of the creation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Odessa Woolfolk, was in attendance, along with Mayor Randall Woodfin and a plethora of other dignitaries. Dr. Davis encouraged activism and brought a message of hope and the trajectory of change.

    She also shared her dismay and suprise about the rescinding of the Fred Shuttlesworth award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. The Institute had originally announced that they were to honor the Birmingham, Alabama, native Angela Davis with its annual Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award but then decided that her current beliefs were not congruent with theirs. Reports all indicate the decision was largely, though not exclusively, due to pressure from Jewish individuals and organizations over Davis’s outspokenness on Palestinian human rights and vocal support for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. (BDS) against Israel. Davis told Democracy Now!on January 11, adding that the BCRI’s decision appears to be an effort to sabotage black solidarity with Palestine. “This was not primarily an assault against me as an individual; it was an assault against a whole generation of activists who have come to recognize how important internationalism is,” Davis said.

    Dr. Davis ended her hour long talk in a discussion-like forum with Dr. Imani Perry, also from Birmingham and now professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, with encouragement to the youth of today and how it was the young people’s movement in Ferguson that RE-ignited the national and even INTERnational discussion on unfair policing policies. “…sometimes we HAVE to do some things differently!”