Officials of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County NAACP said they will be embarking on a 'Journey for Justice' this month.
Officials said, "During this month-long campaign, we will travel to Jackson, Tennessee (March 6-7) for the Tennessee NAACP State Conference Annual Summit on Race Relations, and on Tuesday March 10, the State Conference will hold the 15th Annual Legislative Day on the Hill (Nashville) in order to engage State Lawmakers on issues important to everyday Tennesseans such as Medicaid expansion, increasing the minimum wage, voting rights and ensuring that the State of Tennessee has an adequate bill on racial profiling, because as it now stands, the previous Bill on racial profiling has expired and is regarded as obsolete. This has been one of the major reasons our national office has developed and released our groundbreaking report on these practices, Born Suspects, in order to foster relations and begin to build the bridges that can take us towards common ground.
"In commemoration of Bloody Sunday, our branch will join with the NAACP on a national level as all units will descend on Selma in order to embrace a past paid with sacrifice and blood, and build a future based on hope and love, and our delegation is proud they have been afforded the opportunity to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge in the name of peace, voting rights and human rights. Tennessee, as a State, holds a special distinction in Civil Rights history, for beginning with Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith and other local leaders making a broad appeal for local students and civic leaders to prescribe to principles of non-violence, to the lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, Highlander School, to voting rights campaigns like Selma, Tennessee was on the forefront of these efforts.
"On Tuesday March 17, our Journey for Justice continues as Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Rick Smith will be the primary speaker at our General Membership Meeting to discuss the 'Vision and Future' of education in Chattanooga, Hamilton County.
Finally, like the NAACP, citizens, and groups across the nation, we have received and reviewed the report on Ferguson recently released by the Department of Justice. Perhaps the most comprehensive report which details some of the institutional and systemic challenges which face African-American and minority communities daily, we must strive to shed ourselves of the confirmation biases and attitude polarizations that serve as impenetrable and divisive vices amongst us and aim for inclusive and diverse virtues that can help us reach and attain higher ground with ourselves and one another. Our laws, which derive from the Constitution and legal statutes, our authority, which disseminates from a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, should only be used as the Preamble states, to 'establish justice, promote the general welfare, and ensure domestic tranquility.' Through Restorative Justice, we must begin to balance the great scales of justice, and for this reason we renew our call for all law enforcement agencies, particularly in the outlying law enforcement agencies, to review and implement the recommendations we laid forth in our Blue Ribbon Study Report. We must all work to open up the doors, bring down the barriers, and break down the walls of inadequacy, inaccessibility, indecency, inequality, and injustice in order for the American Dream to come to fruition for us all. The recommendation by the United Nation's on this year rings true, Human Rights must be 365. On that day all the Journeys for Justice will be complete and affirmed."
For more information contact: naacpchattanooga@epbfi.com.