Bending Toward Justice

I took a bit of a break from metadata this week in order to begin working on a new RICHES initiative called Bending Toward Justice: Documenting the Struggle for Political, Economic, and Social Equality.  

The primary deliverable from the Bending Toward Justice project will be a multifaceted, multi-year online exhibit that uses documents, maps, photographs, oral histories, and secondary sources to explore the history of racial inequality in Florida.  RICHES will be coordinating with community groups and academic partners such as the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) to develop the exhibit website.  

Clearly, the subject matter could not be more timely, as we are about to enter the second weekend of protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  It has been incredibly moving to read research articles in support of a project about the history of racial inequality and injustice while NPR updates and interviews about the Black Lives Matter Movement play in the background.

(1)

Bending Toward Justice takes its name from a quotation by the nineteenth-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker that Martin Luther King, Jr. used frequently in his speeches, including during an address delivered at the end of the 54-mile Selma to Montgomery March, on March 25, 1965 (2), as well as in King's "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech, delivered to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta on August 16, 1967: 

"We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future ... Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." (3) 

President Barack Obama found this particular quotation so powerful that he included it among several meaningful quotes that were woven into a rug and placed in the Oval Office during his presidential term (see bottom right of image): (4) 


Dr. King's words about a "courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs" is particularly relevant given that the first phase of the exhibit, which is scheduled to open in November 2020, will focus on Voting Rights and Voter Suppression in Florida. The exhibit opening is intended to coincide with the 2020 presidential election, and will tie in with the 2020 Jerrell Shofner Lecture on Florida History and a series of talks and museum exhibits relating to the 100th anniversary of two events that took place in 1920: the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the right to vote, and the Ocoee Massacre, which took place on November 2, 1920 in the town of Ocoee, just west of Orlando, Florida.  

I will be working on the section of the exhibit that documents the Ocoee Massacre, when a mob lynched prominent African-American businessman July Perry and killed between 6-50 African-American citizens in order to intimidate black voters.  The surviving black residents of Ocoee fled the town, which remained all-white for the next fifty years.

I began my work by analyzing and reading many of the research materials that have already been gathered in advance of formally beginning to develop the exhibit.  In next week’s post, I will describe some of these materials more fully and provide additional context and background about the Ocoee Massacre.

(1) Image from WQAD-TV, "List of Events Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the Quad Cities," https://www.wqad.com/article/news/local/drone/8-in-the-air/heres-a-list-of-events-celebrating-martin-luther-king-jr-day-in-the-quad-cities/526-764ea79a-ce38-4f2a-bed8-e246467560f6, January 18, 2020.

(2) King, Dr. Martin Luther. “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March.” 1965. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/address-conclusion-selma-montgomery-march.

(3) King, Dr. Martin Luther. “Where Do We Go From Here?” 1967.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/where-do-we-go-here-address-delivered-eleventh-annual-sclc-convention.

(4) NBC News. “White House Defends King Quote on Oval Office Rug.” https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/white-house-defends-king-quote-on-oval-office-rug/1877758/.

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