Welcome to the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
My name is Nicole Moore, and I'm the Manager of Education here.
At the Center for Civil and Human Rights,
it's our mission to empower you to take the protection of every human's rights personally,
and so we do that by telling the stories of the American Civil Rights Movement
and tying it with the global Human Rights Movement.
At the center we have three unique gallery experiences.
And on our very first floor you have
Voice to the Voiceless, the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. collection.
In this space, it rotates every three or four months and what
you'll be able to experience are the actual papers and documents of Dr. King.
So you're going to see his books, letters, telegraphs, outlines of his speeches,
and this is one of the few places in the world that you're going to actually see his
original papers.
Coming up to our second floor, which is actually our main floor,
you're going to see Rolls Down Like Water, the American Civil Rights Movement.
And this gallery brings you through in 1954 so you start to see a segregated Atlanta.
And you're going to go all the way until April of 1968, with the assassination of
Dr. King in Memphis, Tennessee.
When students walk into the space, what you're going to notice immediately
is that you're going to see the segregationists
and you're going to hear their voices.
But we not only focus on the segregation,
we also look at how African-American communities thrived in this environment.
And so you're going to see the institutions in Atlanta that made it Atlanta great.
You're going to take a look at Sweet Auburn and you're going to see the Royal Peacock.
You're going to see colleges like Morehouse and Spelman, so you're going to
see how these communities were able to stay successful
when basically the odds are stacked against them.
And then coming into our second portion, which is A Movement Catches Fire.
And what you're going to see then is you're going to meet individuals,
like Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old who integrated her school in Lousiana.
You're going to see Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
One of the most emotional yet important pieces I think of the Center is our sitting counter.
Visitors are invited to sit at the lunch counter and go through a
simulation of what it would have been like
to actually sit and hear the torments and the taunts and understand that
non-violence was not passive-aggressive.
So you get to experience just a small portion of what they would have experienced.
And you get to ask yourself, "Could I have done it?"
But the one thing that really brings people together is
when they come into the space that we're in right now, which is The March on Washington.
And in August 1963, over 250,000 people—black, white, Latino, Asian—
they all descended upon Washington, DC to fight for jobs and freedoms.
And it was the largest peaceful protest held in our country at that time.
Many of you guys know the March on Washington for Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech,
but here you're going to learn about A. Philip Randolph and Dorothy Height and Bayard Rustin,
the organizers of the events.
They had a list of demands that they presented,
and they had various speakers, so that everybody could understand that
we can have a peaceful protest and all we want is jobs and freedom and equality in that.
In Spark of Conviction: The Global Human Rights Movement,
you're going to take the experiences that you learned during the American Civil Rights Movement
and you're going to understand that these issues aren't just in the United States.
You're going to see protests from all over the world.
So when you walk into the space, you'll see these mirrors
and they'll ask "Who like you?"
And you'll have different adjectives that you can choose from to say who like you is threatened around the world.
And what happens is once you choose an adjective, there's a person
that comes and talks to you in this mirror.
And based on the adjective that you chose,
that's going to be your experience if you were to go to their country.
And so we use that to bring the connection to you so that you understand
that these issues are very real, and it's up to us to make sure that we can change
how these rights are viewed.
You'll also be introduced to some defenders of human rights
like Nelson Mandela, Dr. King again, and Gandhi.
You're also gonna see some of the offenders of human rights,
like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Uganda's Idi Amin.
And in this space we want you to understand that these
groups of people either helped or harmed large groups of people.
And when you understand that, and then see in the middle of the space modern-day human
rights defenders, you'll see that human rights and activism doesn't look a certain way.
And so it doesn't matter if you don't have the very best in clothing
or you're not all clean-cut, are you willing to make a change?
And are you willing to take a stand? And that's what really matters.
But no matter what you take away from the Center for Civil and Human Rights,
we hope that you're inspired to act and that you take the protection of every human's rights personally.