by Dominique M., Assistant Editor-in-Chief We all have ideas. We all have plans. We all struggle to find time. We live in a world where we are constantly moving and our society is constantly changing, so it is fitting that our thoughts would do the same. But the problem that happens when we let go of these ideas is we are letting go of the reason why we wanted to fix the problem in the first place.
On November 1, UTC Honors College was able to secure speaker Jonathan Kubakundimana, a program assistant from the Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson. Kubakundimana discussed how, in America, we have many interracial issues that stem from slavery and our history of lynchings. This topic is often uncomfortable, but our speaker was able to take the issue by the reigns and discuss why it is important that we don’t just talk about the ideas and forget them. Rather, he encouraged us to carry the discussion with us in everything we do. The Equal Justice Initiative is creating a museum to commemorate all those who were lynched in the time from slavery to the post-Civil Right era. The museum will hold over 800 columns with over 4,000 names to signify all those who were slaughtered in each county. They plan to have duplicate columns surround the museum in the hopes that each county will choose to take and post their column in their county. The goal is to bring more awareness to our history of terrorism towards African-Americans, because we can’t move forward until we face what has always been a problem. Moreover, Kubakundimana told us about this incredible project, not to scare us, but to heighten our knowledge. The center of his speech was about our history as a nation and how we may be great, but we are only as strong as our weaknesses. No matter how we look at it, our weaknesses stem from the history that we constantly choose to ignore. We can not disregard an entire century of meaningless and senseless killings with the rationale that “all of those terrible things are in the past.” For that precise reason, we need to bring this issue to the forefront of our thinking and the forefront of why we want to improve the nation of America. The Equal Justice Initiative revolves around increasing knowledge on these problems and not just discussing them, but doing something about them. If you would like to learn more about the Equal Justice Initiative or you would like to help, then please feel free to visit https://www.eji.org/ or contact Dominique Malone at [email protected].
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Author's Note:Welcome to The Torch: Reborn, your multicultural newspaper. Archives
December 2018
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Photo used under Creative Commons from J-T-M