During Empowerment Week, the City of Birmingham will be a part of a global effort commemorating the 20th Anniversary of UNESCO Slave Route Project, launched in 1994 in Ouidah (Benin). As a result of Birmingham’s emergence from the civil rights movement to leading the continued human rights movement, it has received the Memory Site Designation as part of UNESCO Slave Route Project. The main objective of the project is to ‘break the silence’.
Mayor William A. Bell, Sr. said, “Concealment of major historical events constitutes an obstacle to mutual understanding, reconciliation and cooperation among peoples.” UNESCO has decided to break the silence surrounding the slave trade and slavery that has affected all continents and caused the great upheavals that have shaped our modern societies.
“This history is part of the universal fight for human rights and equality and is an integral part of what we are remembering and recognizing during Empowerment Week,” Bell says. “This history can nourish our thinking about our multicultural and multiethnic societies today. It inspires the struggles we lead today against racial prejudice and discrimination, and against all forms of slavery that still affect more than 20 million people worldwide,” he continued.
It all starts with a dialogue
Equitable exchange and dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based on mutual understanding and respect and the equal dignity of all cultures is the essential prerequisite for constructing social cohesion, reconciliation among peoples and peace among nations.
Students of WJ Christian were invited to experience the Slavery Route Project. As a part of this program, students participated in a compelling demonstration on Monday, September 15 at 10 a.m. in Railroad Park. Students assembled in the formation of a slave ship as a reenactment. The students then participated in a history lesson and discussion of their experience.
“The challenge of ‘living together’ in our multicultural societies implies recognition of each person’s history and memory, and at the same time the sharing of a common heritage, in order to transcend past tragedies,” said Moussa Iye of UNESCO.
Part of UNESCO’s five specialized sectors is to advance knowledge, standards and intellectual cooperation by:
· protecting, conserving, promoting and transmitting culture, heritage and history for dialogue and development; and
· supporting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions, the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage, and the development of cultural and creative industries.
“We have to recognize that historical injustices have had an unquestionable contribution to poverty, economic inequality, instability and insecurity of many of African descent, not only in Birmingham, Alabama but in every part of the world,” says Bell. “This initiative is one of many throughout Empowerment Week that has been designed to bring people together.”
UNESCO’s mission has been to contribute to the building of peace, poverty eradication, lasting development and intercultural dialogue, with education as one of its principal activities to achieve this aim. The Organization is committed to a holistic and humanistic vision of quality education worldwide, the realization of everyone’s right to education, and the belief that education plays a fundamental role in human, social and economic development.
