MONTGOMERY, Ala. — More than 2,000 people from all over the U.S. gathered here on Saturday for the 40th anniversary of the Southern Poverty Law Center. They celebrated accomplishments of the past and looked to the future of the Center’s ongoing struggle for civil rights. The events spanned three days at venues all over the city that was ground zero of the civil rights movement.
In four decades, the Center’s mission hasn’t changed. It’s carved in stone on the monument outside the headquarters, not far from the church where Martin Luther King Jr., served as pastor. The words on the monument are King’s famous paraphrase of Amos 5:24:
“We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
But what has changed is the way the Center’s fight against hate and its struggle for justice has evolved and expanded onto new fronts. Education is central to that mission and the monument is a reminder of that, too, said Lecia Brooks, the Center’s outreach director.
The idea came from SPLC founder Morris Dees, who years ago was speaking to a group, mentioning names of those who died in the civil rights movement, she said. Young people in the crowd didn’t know who he was talking about.
That served as the inspiration for the memorial, where the names of those martyrs are now carved and which serves as a teaching tool to thousands of visitors to the center each year.
For its first 20 years, the Center did not have an educational program, said Maureen Costello, a veteran education and SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project director. Dees noticed that in litigation against hate groups and against perpetrators of hate crimes, many of the people he was up against were young.
