It’s February once more here at UTM and that means precisely two things.
One: it is unreasonably cold and wet, and two: the Annual Civil Rights Conference is back in town.
This year marked UTM’s 20th annual conference and featured as its keynote speaker Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a civil rights activist who participated in over 50 sit-ins and demonstrations as a young woman.
While it’s too late to attend this year’s Civil Rights Conference, we at The Pacer would like to encourage you to find time to attend next year’s conference. We realize that some students aren’t 100% sold on attending the conference, but we would like to explain why we think it’s important for people to attend and how it represents a positive step forward for society.
First off, the why. Why should you take time out of your already busy schedule to listen to someone talk about a topic that, let’s be frank, many college students just aren’t interested in?
When you’re juggling the competing demands of work, school, and in some cases family obligations, it may seem silly to take the time out to come to one of these events, especially if the topic concerns something that happened 60 or more years ago.
Consider this, many of those who took up the mantle of civil rights in the 60s were also in school or had jobs, but their belief in the importance of their activism was so fulfilling to them that they sacrificed their time and careers to pursue social justice.
Perhaps that’s not you. Even so, having an understanding of modern civil rights issues could be the stepping stone to your involvement in a movement for the kind of change you want to see in the world.
Some students, usually men of European descent, are scared off from such events because they don’t want to be lectured or singled-out. But we would challenge you to attend the conference events, without a posture of defensiveness, and see if your experiences match expectations. Don’t knock it till you try it, so they say.
Some of you might be wondering if the discussion even matters anyways. After all, activists have been beating the civil rights drum for 60 years now and some people are rightly skeptical either that any progress will be made or that any standard pleasing to everyone can be attained.
To this we say, the greatest questions are those that we’ve been pondering for thousands of years. What does it mean to be a good person? Is there an afterlife? Why are we here?
These are the kinds of questions that keep people talking forever. The central question at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement is “What is justice, and how do we attain it?” which, for all you Philosophy majors and minors, is the question at the center of book one of Plato’s Republic.
For these reasons and more, we encourage all UTM students to attend our Annual Civil Rights Conference.
