A&O Meetup on July 14 in Atlanta at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights

June 23, 2014

A&O Meetup on July 14 in Atlanta at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
By Bo Emerson

ATLANTA---On Monday, June 23, 2014 the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opens its doors, offering visitors a history of the freedom movement in this country (told from Atlanta’s perspective) and an accounting of the modern human rights activism that civil rights pioneers inspired.The museum is in downtown Atlanta, to the east of Atlanta's Auburn Avenue District. Its immediate neighbors in the Pemberton Place tourist mecca are the World of Coke and the Georgia Aquarium. Nearby are Centennial Olympic Park and CNN Center. [link]

*A&O members are invited to Meetup with Verneida Britton in Atlanta at the National Center on Monday, July 14 at 11:00 a.m. RSVP to "Tahlib(at)AlphaOmegaArts.org."

Meetup at the Human Rights museum on July 14, 2014. Debbie Crum, Verneida Britton, Novella Smith

On the bus to Alabama

Verneida Britton, A&O Executive Director

Group photo arrival in Alabama

16th Street Baptist Church group photo

One work in the center's collection based on the life of Congressman
John Lewis. "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking" by Benny Andrews.

Comments

Ed Rothstein, The New York Times said…

It isn’t that great a distance from the birthplace of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Auburn Avenue here to the $68 million, 42,000 square-foot National Center for Civil and Human Rights that is opening on Monday near Centennial Olympic Park. The two sites, though, seem as if they’ve emerged not just from different time periods, but from different and incompatible universes. The main source of the center’s appeal, though, will lie in its main first floor exhibition, “Rolls Down Like Water: The American Civil Rights Movement,” which follows the doctrines of a museum of experience rather than a museum of objects. At any rate, the exhibition itself is finely executed. We are then led into another exhibition: “Spark of Conviction: The Global Human Rights Movement.” It is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in establishing as a guidepost for the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II. There are video statements by people who have had their rights violated: a lesbian from Nicaragua, a blogger from Iran, a white farmer from Zimbabwe. There is a wall of mass murderers: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Pinochet. There are portraits of individuals who have undertaken, sometimes at great risks, fights for disability rights, immigrants’ rights, H.I.V./AIDS advocacy, and “L.G.B.T. Rights.” And if we are meant to connect all of this with the fight for civil rights in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, doesn’t it seem to devalue the nature of that fight, by associating it with every other perceived injustice? Others, I am sure, will find the continuity apparent; I found it like a message from a distant third universe when I was still immersed in the two surrounding me, which are still being unveiled.

Mon Jun 23, 05:16:00 AM EDT

Alan Blinder, The New York Times said…

Far from his typical Broadway haunts, the director George C. Wolfe was walking through a construction site here this spring when, amid a cacophony of saws and drills, he stopped and stood before what was to become a replica of a lunch counter that he said would claw visitors back into history. The display at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Mr. Wolfe said, would allow people to don headphones, rest their hands on the counter and hear a volley of heckles similar to what demonstrators heard during the civil rights movement. Whether the $80 million complex — backed by a mix of public and private funding, with the land donated by Coca-Cola — will fulfill the entirety of that lofty vision is a question that could take decades to answer. But Doug Shipman, the center’s chief executive, said it would be both a vivid link to the city’s rich civil rights history and a prod toward social change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/us/atlanta-civil-rights-museum.html?src=xps

Mon Jun 23, 08:31:00 AM EDT

Barbara Becker, The Huffington Post said…

Family-Friendly Center for Civil and Human Rights Opens in Atlanta. On a recent walk-through of the new National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR) in Atlanta, CEO Doug Shipman looked at the group of social justice activists and their families -- all spread across the gallery and engaged in one display or another -- and said, "This is it right here -- skim, swim or dive. There's content for every type of audience."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-becker/national-center-for-civil-rights_b_5513018.html

Mon Jun 23, 08:37:00 AM EDT

Human Rights Watch said…

New Atlanta Museum to Educate, Inspire Future Generations. The opening of the new Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta is an important milestone to increase awareness of national and global human rights issues in the United States, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch is one of five official partners of the center, contributing expertise and content to its Global Human Rights Gallery.

The Center for Civil and Human Rights was conceived in 2007 as a cultural bridge between the American civil rights movement and contemporary international human rights advocacy. Its core mission is engagement and empowerment.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/20/us-center-civil-and-human-rights-opens

Mon Jun 23, 08:41:00 AM EDT