A Passion for Justice

Tonight at the University was our speaker Morris Dees. He is the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a huge civil rights activist. I brought him to speak at the University as a social justice speaker. He has been very successful in at other universities drawing a large crowd. Well at UMSL he drew a very large crowd, but with Dees, comes a price. He bankrupted the Klan, and several other hate groups in the U.S. The Klan has a price on his head, and everywhere he goes he gets death threats. Including UMSL. We had the FBI at the event, we had the county police, and we had the UMSL cops. Like I said the event drew a large crowd, and several of the audience members were part of those hate groups. At least 5 times during the speech he was interrupted by people shouting at him. Those people were taken out by the UMSL police and the speech continued. There was a lot of upset people at the event, and a lot of upset students. I feel it was good for them to see that type of hate up close. It really made me sick to see these people at the event, but Dees was prepared for it and used the people to illustrate his point. America has a long way to go. For every step forward in social justice, we take one or two steps back! I really hope the event as a whole fired some student up, or at least showed them that hate is real in this world. It was actually quite sad to look at some of the people who were yelling at him. All I could think about is how awful it must be to feel hate like that in your life, and never really understand what love and compassion are about. On the day after Rosa Parks died, this event could not have been more important. She is the one that started the fire and there are a lot of people in this county trying to put it out. It makes me proud that there are people in this world like Dees, who with all the death threats, still comes and talks to people about social injustice. It is people like him that keep that fire going, and I hope when he is going like Rosa, that this fire is still burning. Because social justice is not only about race, but age, sexual orientation, gender, and economic status.