We’d drive or walk from Big Bethel AME Church at 220 Auburn, an African-American church whose roots reach all the way back to 1840, then eastward past Wheat Street Baptist Church at 359, and finally to Ebenezer Baptist at 407, just east of which lie the graves of the Rev. He shares a story about Vivian’s dealings with Jim Clark, the white sheriff of Dallas County, Ala., the seat of which is Selma. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”, GENERAL STOREPODCASTFOODWAYSCOCKTAILSPHOTO ESSAYS, CUSTOMER SERVICE PRIVACY POLICY SUBMISSIONSMEMBERSHIPS. You couldn’t dance to it, like you could a New Orleans rhythm. Other Southern cities were different. It was about everybody. You couldn’t taste it, like Memphis barbecue. “Half of consulting at a place like BCG is about the problem, and the other half is actually how you get everybody to move in the same direction. Like the old tale, it was a story of struggle, but it was also a story of redemption, a story about a gift that Atlanta gave to the South, to America, and to the whole round world. It was trying to liberate everybody. It features quotes from Margaret Mead and Nelson Mandela and perfectly represents all that the Center is working toward. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta is an engaging cultural attraction that connects the American Civil Rights Movement to today’s struggle for Global Human Rights. The Center for Civil and Human Rights is A TREMENDOUS ACHIEVEMENT, unlike anything this city has ever seen . This gallery, featuring personal belongings and writings of Martin Luther King Jr., also projects the phrase “I have a dream” onto the Southern pine walls in more than 20 languages. C.T. What change will it have brought about? I think Richardson could be right, and it fills me with hope to imagine that coming generations of Atlantans and Southerners will hear a different version of their region’s history — not the whitewashed one that the Daughters of the Confederacy have peddled for more than a century, but the unvarnished one, the real story about what happened when our forefathers forgot that living the Golden Rule requires loving every neighbor as yourself. The monumental Center for Civil and Human Rights (CCHR) is enriching the skyline of Downtown Atlanta and it is finally giving the city, birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., its own civil rights museum. The interplay between the first two galleries is what gives the Center’s story its power. remove our site from your Compatibility View list. The facility highlights Atlanta's – and its people's – role in the civil rights movement like no other. It makes sense that she would come home to the place where blacks and whites somehow made it through that era of change without the same scars of other Southern cities. That's what religions do. But his conciliatory approach to business and journalism did not protect him from a murderer’s bullet in February of 1934. When he was in his late 30s, he’d been beside Dr. King at the March on Washington and in the terror-filled Selma-to-Montgomery marches two years later. That is tremendous hope. This fledgling cultural institution has already SUCCEEDED IN EXPANDING ATLANTA'S ETHICAL FOOTPRINT. Through academic programs, we seek to make the study of civil and human rights a centerpiece of education at Notre Dame. The crime remains unsolved to this day. But for Atlantans, it also captures, more fully than anything before it, the fact that through all the confrontations and conflagrations of the movement, our city did not come completely unglued. They studied 35 museums around the country and worked to hone a strong vision of what the idea should actually become. That experience inspired him to take courses on race, women’s studies and religion throughout his time at Emory. It happens entirely by design, owing largely to the thinking of a man named George C. Wolfe. © Copyright 2018 National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Inc. All Rights Reserved. I suppose I’d grown up thinking that people thought the heart of Atlanta was in its rise from the ashes post-Civil War. This is not an unintended consequence of what the Center collects and displays. Franklin had occasionally relied on the Atlanta office of Boston Consulting Group for pro bono work on broad community projects. one time, I said, ‘Why did you keep doing it?’ He said, ‘Because I really believed that I wasn't just working for my own liberation, I was working for his, too. You could call the place a museum, and you’d be right but not wholly right. After two years in the corporate world, Shipman went to graduate school, not for the management consultant’s requisite MBA, but to study at the Harvard Divinity School. He had come to Atlanta in 1991 from his tiny hometown in northern Arkansas, Bull Shoals, thanks to a Robert W. Woodruff Scholarship from Emory University. The center is broken into three galleries. And all of the civil rights icons, all of them talked about that. every day got up early and went to the courthouse in Selma, and Jim Clark met him there almost every day,” Shipman says. Having served on that board for two years with Alexis, I felt comfortable enough with her during our recent interview at the Center’s new offices on Williams Street to bring up a what felt like a difficult topic. I'm liberated from having to be in a certain role because of me being white. These three churches, I would explain, gave birth to the American Civil Rights Movement. The videos are then curated and shown on the wall of the Center for Civil and Human Rights. People leave the Center, by contrast, talking about the stories they learned. We do have one guy here who knows a whole lot about civil rights history, but he's young and white. That small common space between the galleries reminds the visitor of the awful reality of all struggles for human rights: the fact that too often, those who fight for their rights die in the process. You cannot say, ‘I didn’t know.’ That made the difference, I think, on both sides.”. The Center takes you through history, because you need that knowledge, but it does not let you leave before it challenges you to act. Ozell Sutton sat in a wheelchair in stunned silence, staring at a life-sized photograph of a man named Theatrice Bailey, the brother of the Lorraine's owner, on bended knee, scrubbing away the blood of his friend, the martyr, who had slept in the next room the night before. One day in 2005 she asked BCG if they would volunteer a team of people to help evaluate whether the idea of a “civil rights museum” was viable. You’ll leave with an appreciation for how far we have come and hope for the future. Maybe we should just call it the High Church of Doing the Right Thing. “C.T. We saw James Brown perform on a stage under the Connector (the interstate highway through downtown that splits Atlanta into eastern and western halves). Mayor Franklin replied that if he could do the work, she didn’t care what he looked like. This feels like what things should be like. I felt like the heart of Atlanta had finally found a home — a place that assembles all the bits of history and all the ghosts of martyrs you could feel in the air on Auburn Avenue and makes them shockingly, unavoidably real. The third — a quiet and dimly lit space on the lower level — will house ever-changing exhibits of artifacts from the papers of Dr. King. The second tells the stories of modern human-rights struggles around the world, and its exhibitions will change far more frequently as events change. “Somebody was complaining that, well, if you stand up, people can’t get on your back, and I said, ‘Okay. “During that process, within the team and then with Mayor Franklin and with A.J. In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, Alexis Scott was a 19-year-old student at Barnard College in New York City, directly across Broadway from the campus of Columbia University. Richardson grew up in Collier Heights, a neighborhood in western Atlanta that was the city’s first built by and for African-Americans. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights stands purely and triumphantly for the last part of the story. Our purpose is to create a safe space for visitors to explore the fundamental rights of all human beings so that they leave inspired and empowered to join the ongoing dialogue about human rights in their communities. Every day, I believed that we could be reconciled with one another and that Jim Clark could see that he was wrong and he could be better.’. When the Olympics came to town back in 1996, there appeared downtown (at no small cost and a considerable amount of upheaval) a new public green, Centennial Olympic Park. I thought, ‘This is heaven! But for a white person to do it, and especially a white man to do it, that makes all the difference because that’s the realization and acknowledgement that, you know, that there is some responsibility that you have in this equation.”. Scott took the job after a long career in the family business — journalism. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser. It would turn here. It’s a great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.”. And it will be the place where those young Southerners will start asking each other questions they need to ask. They had passed the point in the story where Dr. King is assassinated in Memphis, and they were watching film of Dr. King’s funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta. It will be the place where current and future generations of Southerners will bring their children and grandchildren to learn the unvarnished history of our region. In New Orleans, the city’s genuinely unique, polyglot culture had created hundreds of ways for the visitor to feel its beating heart: through its foods, its architecture or that infectious Second Line beat that comes right out and says, “This is New Orleans music.”. To me, it almost feels like a temple, in the larger, secular sense: “the structure of thought, value, or belief that enshrines the spirit or essence of something.”. I had grown up Pentecostal and so I knew all the music. And two, you wind up telling a story that goes something like this: OK, our ancestors decided to fight a war that would allow them to keep people of color enslaved, and they lost that war, and in the process, my entire hometown got burned down. Sadly, it instantly became known not as a watershed in the history of downtown Atlanta, but as the site of a bombing by anti-gay and anti-abortion zealot Eric Rudolph. Copyright © 2020 - 233 Peachtree Street, NE Suite 1400, Atlanta, GA 30303. The first tells the story of the American Civil Rights Movement, and that gallery, given its firm roots in history, will be the least likely to change over time. The Center for Civil and Human Rights has an interactive global map highlighting human rights issues around the world. To me, this seems entirely appropriate. Located in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, the museum opened to the public on June 23, 2014. would pray for Jim Clark, go home, and come back the next day. He and his team worked with Franklin, Robinson and other Atlanta community leaders in Atlanta through 2006. Her grandfather, William Alexander Scott II, started a weekly newspaper for the black community in 1928 called the Atlanta World. If you don’t mind upgrading to the latest version, it’ll look just right. Alexis introduced me to her companion, Tina Sutton. Start here and then visit the. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Heavens to Betsy…Our site is a little all over the place in this browser. If so, Atlanta.net may really look a hot mess. They say, ‘Oh, my gosh. Through harnessing Atlanta’s legacy and galvanizing the corporate, faith-based, public-sector and university communities, The Center serves as the ideal place to reflect on the past, … Sutton, born in Arkansas, was one of the first African-Americans to be admitted to the U.S. Marine Corps. For the love of the South. He put it into almost rooms of museum experience. To judge it as a museum is to judge it unfairly. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights will broaden your view of who was active in the fight for civil rights. I can only tell you how I felt — as a Southerner, as an Atlantan, and as a human — when I walked out of the place for the first time last week. It will have a curve and it would do this.