This week, the Office of Inclusion and Diversity along with the College of Liberal Arts will host three events to begin their process of “Becoming the Beloved Community.”
Each of the three events is free and open to the public. Guests are invited to bring memorabilia that represents love, truth and justice and share their stories on the Becoming the Beloved Community website.
Auburn University journalism, political science and accounting majors are designing, writing stories, taking photographs and recording video for the website that will be housed under the Auburn University Office of Inclusion and Diversity.
In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination 50 years ago, Auburn will host two days of events leading toward Becoming the Beloved Community.
Sarah Collins-Rudolph, a survivor of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the four young girls killed in the bombing, will give a lecture on Wednesday, April 4, from 1–2 p.m.
The lecture will be held at Pebble Hill and is titled, “Fifty Years Later: 1968-2018 Race and Faith in the U.S.” Following the lecture, there will be a march from Haley Center to Langdon Hall at 5:30 p.m.
Collins-Rudolph will host a conversation at the end of the march and then join students and community residents for a candlelight vigil in front of Samford Hall. At 7:05 p.m., the bells of Samford Hall will chime to commemorate when King was assassinated at the same date and time in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art will host the intergenerational, interdisciplinary and interfaith discussions and panel on Thursday, April 5, from 1:30-5:30 p.m.
The panel will include Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of the Auburn University department of history and Rev. Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
“The beloved community” is a term King popularized at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956.
When King addressed the Civil Rights supporters, he declared that ending segregation was not the only goal but rather "the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”
Joan R. Harrell, visiting assistant professor in the College of Liberal Arts School of Communication and Journalism, will create a 21st-century intergenerational, interfaith version of King’s beloved community vision and has received support from the Office of Inclusion and Diversity.
Harrell’s proposal on Becoming the Beloved Community in Auburn focuses primarily on diversity in faith and religion.
“Racially segregated white churches and black churches in the Deep South played an integral role in the Civil Rights Movement, impacting the social-economic-political landscape of the nation and especially the culture of the state of Alabama and the rest of the Deep South,” Harrell said. “The religious landscape of the Deep South is no longer exclusive to ‘black Christians and white Christians’ because the cultural and religious demographics of the United States are changing. These changes in our region seem to us to be an invitation for learning and dialogue.”
Auburn University and the City of Auburn are located in the center of the Civil Rights corridor between Montgomery and Selma, with the entire state of Mississippi to the west and Atlanta to the east, Harrell said.
“We are thus uniquely positioned to explore the legacy of these defining movements in our community and in our region,” Harrell said. “One of our goals is to create a digital Becoming the Beloved Community site, which would be used by our local, national and international neighbors to help start conversations and implement intentional transformation for a just society.”
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