It’s the anniversary of the first March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (1965), known as “Bloody Sunday.” Six hundred civil rights activists left Selma to march the 54 miles to the state capitol, demonstrating for African-American voting rights. They got six blocks before state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.
ABC News interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary to show footage of the violence. In the blink of a television set, national public opinion about civil rights shifted. Demonstrations broke out across the country.
Two weeks later, the March from Selma made it to Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, federal court protection, and these words from President Lyndon Johnson: “There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.” When they got to Montgomery, they were 25,000 strong.
Happy National Standing on the Side of Love Day!
It was a grand experiment: 30 Days of Love. And we have arrived!
Starting with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we embarked on a journey to discover our Story of Self, Story of Us, and Story of Now. Today — National Standing on the Side of Love Day, where we re-imagine Valentine’s Day as a social justice holiday of love and acceptance for all people – we are taking action for equality across the country. Stay tuned later this week to see all the ways in which we honored courageous love, examined our stories of us and now, and engaged in public witness.
On behalf of all of us at the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, please accept a hearty Thank You!
(via Day 30: Happy National Standing on the Side of Love Day « Standing On The Side Of Love)
Welcome to THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE, beginning Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and culminating with Valentine’s Day! THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE is a collective visioning process about making sense of the present moment, and what we are called to do. We aim to accomplish this through self-reflection, active listening, sharing personal and community stories, and celebrating our lives and our heroes for their courageous love.
THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE offers daily, direct actions for love, and the calendar is a template to guide you through a meaningful THIRTY DAYS. But your participation is envisioned as a process, not an event.
While there is great power in collective action, the beauty of Standing on the Side of Love is its “open source” spirit, so bring your own ideas, actions, and traditions with you for this journey.
(via National Standing on the Side of Love Month: The Story of Us, The Story of Now « Standing On The Side Of Love)
Stand for the “Beloved Community.”
Speaking of love, I love being a UU.
Along with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (the first woman president in Africa), and journalist Tawakkul Karman, she is this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I met her in a luncheon reception just before her address which you can see in this link.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee UMass Lowell Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies “Days Without Violence” featured speaker
Gbowee helped bring an end to Liberia’s bloody civil war. I wrote about her last year.
Dr. King, whose life was spent preaching unconditional love and nonviolent redemptive good, continues to inspire people the world over who are helping to shape his vision of an “arc of the moral universe” that is long but bends toward justice. Gandhi, King, Mandela—there are precious few whose legacies resonate with those who are risking their lives today, in a nonviolent fashion, to eliminate the evils of racism, poverty, militarism and environmental destruction. King’s tribute to global peacemakers should have reached out to them as the legitimate heirs of the King legacy, not the monied interests who helped pay for the piece of carved granite that bears his image.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the very church where Dr. King once pastored, new Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley gave a speech in which he said that those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior are not his “brothers.
