Oxfam helps communities around the world fix up their wells and learn how to treat their drinking water to avoid water-borne diseases. It’s particularly important during times when people are short on food, due to bad harvests following drought, floods, or any sort of humanitarian emergency. This was the case in Senegal in 2011 and 2012, when Oxfam’s program helped farmers recover from a drought and bad harvest in 2011. Oxfam delivered some cash to help farmers buy food, but we also helped them to address water and sanitation and hygiene, all closely linked to malnutrition — because if you have a stomach ailment from drinking bad water, you won’t benefit from the nutrition derived from what food you can find.

1: Protect the top

Build a wall around the top of the well, with a reinforced concrete drainage apron around it. This will prevent surface water running into the well; particularly important where there are animal droppings around.

2: Reduce turbidity

If a well is serving up cloudy, muddy water, it may have too much silt at the bottom. Send an intrepid digger down there with a shovel to dig out the silt and debris, then put a layer of gravel at the bottom of the well. The gravel will keep the silt down, and when someone drops a bucket on a rope down to the bottom of the well it will be less likely to scoop up silt as well as water.

3: Disinfect

Scrub down the sides of the well with a chlorine solution to kill microbes that can make people sick. Disinfect the well water by temporarily adding a strong chlorine solution (removed before the well goes back into operation).

4: Cover it

Install a reinforced concrete cover over the top of the well to keep anything from falling in and polluting the water.

5: Install a pump

This will make it easier to draw water, if a community can afford to maintain a pump (not always the case—pumps break down and take money, time, and spare parts to repair). Oxfam is introducing a variety of pumps, including locally manufactured and easily maintained rope pumps.  A pump piping water up from the bottom of the well takes away the possibility of infecting water with a dirty bucket or rope.

6: Treat the water

In eastern Senegal, Oxfam distributed hygiene kits that included bleach – just a capful in a 10-liter container will kill bugs that make people sick.  In the southern region near Kolda, Oxfam also installed special dispensers near the wells that dole out a pre-measured portion of a chlorine solution that will safely treat a container of well water. Oxfam works with communities to solve drinking water problems in emergencies because water-borne diseases can be devastating especially for malnourished children. But we also work on water and sanitation and irrigation in our long-term programs.

This post was originally published August 20, 2013, and was updated in October 2018.

Clean water can mean the difference between health and sickness, or even life and death. Help provide a community with buckets, chlorine dispensers, and other essentials.  Donate now

Oxfam

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It’s a Monday afternoon at a high school in Mercedes, a town in Camarines Norte, the Philippines, and disasters are on everyone’s minds.

I’m afraid I’m the one who put them there.

An Oxfam partner has been helping local leaders prepare schools and communities for disasters, so when I turn up, the students and staff interrupt their work to show me how it’s going. 

What I see I’ll probably never forget.

At first, every classroom I visit is absorbed in the topic of disaster preparedness. Students in one room are learning how to track a typhoon; in another, teams with names like “Storm Army” and “The Mighty Rescuers” are competing for honors like “best-equipped emergency backpack.”

Suddenly, an alarm sounds. The students drop to a crouch and cover their heads; at a signal from their teacher, they file out to a courtyard – quickly, but quietly and in perfect order. Moments later, two teams of students bearing stretchers appear in their midst.  At a signal, they fetch two students from a school building who lie very still, feigning unconsciousness. The responders transfer the limp bodies expertly onto stretchers, and trot them to safety in the courtyard. What follows is a fast-paced first aid drill, with one student leader on each team shouting orders and others following quickly—immobilizing a head, binding a wound, and splinting a broken bone.  No slipups, and not a moment wasted. Put another way, if you had an accident, these are the people you’d want by your side.

Keeping it local

“We take reducing risk very seriously,” said Antonio España. España works in the Disaster Risk Reduction office of Camarines Norte and is a member of the Consortium for Humanitarian Action and Protection (CHAP)—both of which support preparedness work in the schools. His goal: ensure that every student and every household in the province is ready to face the next emergency—and lives to tell the tale. 

Oxfam is boosting the local efforts. For the last three years, we’ve worked together with Tearfund and Christian Aid on a project in the Philippines known as Financial Enablers, or FEP, which has been supporting groups like CHAP to help people prepare for and survive the hazards that plague the island nation.

The FEP has another important job, which is to make sure our local partners stay in the driver’s seat at every step. Making sure they choose what skills to build and how to build them, for example. It’s all part of our goal to shift humanitarian knowledge, resources, and leadership to the people who need them most—those who live in the most dangerous places on Earth.

Watching Filipino young people execute a flawless simulation, I can’t help but think we are on the right track.

Watch and share a video about another FEP partner success.

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Joi Owens is an attorney and single mother in Jackson, Mississippi, where she currently serves as the Gulf Coast policy officer for Oxfam America.

Today is “Equal Pay Day” in the US: a day that marks the point in the calendar when a man could start working, and still earn what a woman will make for the entire year.

This day rolls around every year. In the year 2018, we know that this pay gap does not make sense.

I personally know how important this is because I’m a single mom of a wonderful eight-year-old boy. Being a single parent is challenging, and being a single mother is a long bumpy road.

I had him when I was in my first year of law school. To put it simply, I struggled immensely. I was receiving public assistance, including TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). But, with a lot of hard work and perseverance, we made it through school and into the workplace. Today, I have a career where I put in long hours to provide a happy home for my child.

Despite all this effort, however, I’m well aware that I still live in a society that does not value my work as much –simply because of my gender. And this hurts not just me, but my family. My son is smart, kind, and talented. He deserves all the opportunities that would be available to him if I were a man, and made the same kind of money that men do.

Equal pay for equal work

Of course, women have come a long way, and do a lot of jobs today. We are doctors, lawyers, engineers, factory workers, firefighters, members of the police force, and so much more–and our work is as meaningful as any man’s. We have daughters and sons who depend on us to bring our fair share home. We work hard and long hours, and it’s time that our pay reflects that.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 both demand equal pay for equal work, yet we still see disparities in pay. Sadly, these gaps grow ever wider when we look at the statistics for women of color, and for women in the South (especially Mississippi).

While the national average is that women make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes, women in Mississippi earn just 75 cents. Black women earn 63 cents against men across the country; Latinas earn 54 cents. [These statistics may vary slightly by source; these are from the American Association of University Women.]

What would it mean for women in Mississippi to close this gap? Median annual pay for a woman working full-time in Mississippi is $31,110; for a man, it’s $41,092. This differential, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF) would pay for a lot of things: almost 14 months of rent, or more than nine months of mortgage and utility payments, or about 78 weeks (one and a half years) of food for her family.

Women are becoming the breadwinners of more and more families, and they should be paid as such. Single moms head 78,000 households living in poverty in Mississippi, and closing this gap would allow these families to break the cycle of poverty. Moreover, for the 60 percent of Mississippi university degrees that are earned by women, it gives them a reason to stay in Mississippi, instead of moving to other states that protect equal pay for equal work. 

So what are some possible solutions? The NPWF suggests the following: 

1. Enact protections to help identify and challenge discriminatory pay and employment practices and address gender-based occupational segregation.
2. Increase the minimum wage.
3. Offer family-friendly workplace supports like paid family and medical leave and paid sick days. 
4. Provide affordable child care. 
5. Ensure access to comprehensive reproductive health care. 
6. Remove the “past salary” section on job applications (to prevent employers from offering pay based on previous amounts, rather than workplace standards).

All of this is especially stark for women in my state of Mississippi, one of only two states in the nation (along with Alabama) that does not have an Equal Pay bill on the books. Last year, when the effort last failed in Mississippi, several other states passed bills to close the pay gap (California, Colorado, Delaware, Nevada, Oregon and Puerto Rico). It’s been 55 years since President Kennedy signed the federal Equal Pay Act into law.

We’ll try again this year, as the legislature goes into session; hopefully we can raise the issue above the long-standing partisan divide, and put something on the books that offers hope to me, and the many women around me–all of us working hard and struggling to get by.

It’s well past time for our economy, and legislature, to recognize that women need to earn the same wages for the same work. Our families, and our future, depend on it.

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Here’s some positive news: The heads of 116 development organizations based here in the US have endorsed a pledge to protect their staff and the people they serve from sexual abuse and exploitation, and to take concerted action against harassment and abuse.

It’s called the CEO Pledge on Preventing Sexual Abuse, Exploitation, and Harassment by and of NGO Staff, and it was created by the members of InterAction, the alliance of international nongovernmental organizations here in the US. Oxfam is a longstanding member of InterAction, and I was honored to serve as co-chair of the group tasked with creating this CEO pledge, which we started working on in December, 2017.

I see the CEO Pledge as an essential and welcome first step to get all of us who work on international development to agree on and commit to fundamental standards for our organizations to address problems of sexual abuse and exploitation. While many InterAction members (including Oxfam) already have more robust standards in these areas, the CEO pledge will help all the signatories to create transparent policies and a culture that encourages reporting of incidents. It will also commit us all to find ways of ensuring our investigations of incidents are comprehensive and we prevent offenders from being re-employed by others in our sector.

I hope this is just the beginning of coordinated and collective action that the aid and development world needs to stamp out sexual abuse and harassment. Our staff and the people we serve demand it.  We must create an environment for our work where we prevent the more powerful people from preying on the more vulnerable. This type of injustice is not unique to the aid and development world, but organizations committed to ending poverty and human rights violations have a special responsibility to respond to it.

I’m proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellow CEOs to move our sector in the right direction. But I am also hoping the US organizations signing this pledge, along with InterAction, will facilitate collaboration with organizations based in other countries to build a global pledge to do the same. It may be a small step, but it is the start of a new era.

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There’s a newly built water reservoir in a small town in northeast Ghana. When you stand on top of the dam embankment with the water behind you, you can see an outflow pipe leading to…nothing. It’s supposed to supply water to an irrigation canal, running into an area where farmers want to grow vegetables during the dry season (and other crops like rice year round). Other, smaller canals will run out of it, eventually serving five villages and hundreds of farmers. It was supposed to be finished more than 18 months ago, but the leaders of this village, called Zakpalisi, say they have not seen the contractor in months. “The project is stalled,” Mohamed Nasam, chairman of the Zakpalisi development council tells a group of researchers visiting the project. “We need help to get it completed.” The researchers, from an organization supported by Oxfam called the African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), decided to visit Zakpalisi because the project was paid for with revenue collected from oil production. The total project cost was reported by the Ministry of Finance to be US$ 380,547. A colleague in Ghana pointed out to me that this amount of money is roughly the cost of at least four Toyota Land cruiser 4×4 vehicles, the favorite of politicians in the country. Where could this money be?  At the time we were in Zakpalisi, it was not clear if this unfinished irrigation system is a case of corruption or some other problem, but ACEP is getting to the bottom of the matter to find out where the money for the project has gone. Ghana has special sunshine legislation that allows organizations like ACEP to see what oil companies pay the government, and how the government deploys the money in its budget. Oxfam partnered with ACEP to go out and see if the infrastructure projects funded by oil money are actually being built properly and on schedule. ACEP created a web-based video portal called “Oil Money TV” (oilmoneytv.org) to help share information with citizens about how the country is using its petroleum revenues.

Following money: Not easy

I was recently with ACEP staff in Zakpalisi (and one other community with a similar project), because for years now I have been trying to follow oil and mining revenues to see if and how they actually help people in poor countries. And I’m here to tell you, it’s not easy. This is a shame, because there are so many countries rich in oil, gas, and gold, which are still poor.  Governments don’t manage the revenue well, and lose the opportunity to use their natural resource wealth to fund schools and hospitals, pay teachers and doctors and nurses, or help small-scale farmers, or improve roads and bridges.

Part of the problem is that citizens just can’t track the money. “We can’t even look at half of the oil-funded projects,” Alhassan Idrissu, ACEP’s head of programs told me. It’s expensive to move around the country and do the research to see what’s actually happening to all that money. “Apart from ACEP, no organization is tracking oil money to the village level,” he told me.

Transparency under threat

Here at Oxfam we’re coming at the problem from both ends: We’re helping groups in countries like Ghana push for laws and policies that will help them track their natural resource revenues, and then get out there and monitor how the money is used. And we’ve also advocated for laws in the US and other countries that require companies to disclose how much they pay governments. Both help groups like ACEP find out what happens to all that dough. In the US, Section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires companies to disclose their payments, but a bill now working its way through the House of Representatives  proposes to eliminate this mandate. Its proponents have a number of knowingly false and misguided arguments crafted by oil industry lobbyists for why they want to repeal Section 1504. But at the end of the day, repealing this law will not help US companies create jobs, be more competitive, or generate wealth for shareholders. It will simply create a better environment for secrecy and corruption, make it harder for citizens to follow the money, hold their own government accountable, and fight poverty.

I once met a village chief in the Niger Delta, where Nigeria gets all its oil. His village had been destroyed by conflict and was impoverished. He knew what did this to his community, and was wearing a T-shirt with a simple message: “Kill Corruption.” If you want to help him and millions of others demanding government accountability, and use their natural resource wealth to fight poverty, you can stand up to protect this law: Right now the best way to help kill corruption is to tell your members of Congress to reject the oil lobby’s efforts to repeal Section 1504. Tell your members of Congress: A vote to repeal Section 1504 is a vote for corruption! Call your Representative in the House and your Senator: (202) 224-3121

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By now, many of you will have heard a great deal about the sexual misconduct cases that have led Oxfam to take a hard look at our past mistakes. There are no excuses. As an organization built on the highest principles, we have undermined the trust and diminished our credibility with our supporters. Worse, we have failed in our core mission—to protect the most vulnerable people everywhere we work.

We cannot undo any of that.

But I still believe wholeheartedly in Oxfam. I believe in our integrity, in the power of people to change their lives, and in the work we do to tackle poverty. I am now, more than ever, committed to our aim of holding the powerful accountable. Today, that includes ourselves. I won’t flinch in the face of that truth, as painful as it is.

We will not flag in working to rebuild your confidence in Oxfam because too much is at stake in our world. Too many people living in poverty need your empathy, commitment, and support. And while we have made some serious errors, our basic beliefs have not changed: We have zero tolerance for abuse of people in any form, and we stand firmly against the exploitation and abuse of women and girls. We are one hundred percent committed to learning from our mistakes and to building a culture where abuse stands no chance of festering.

Our first step is to form an independent commission to carry out a wide-ranging review of Oxfam’s practices and culture, including our handling of past cases of sexual misconduct. We have asked a team of women’s rights experts to serve in this high-level group and will grant them access to Oxfam records and interviews with staffers, partners, and the communities we work with around the world. This new commission is part of a comprehensive plan to strengthen safeguarding systems across our organization. Other measures include:

• The immediate creation of a new global database of accredited referees—designed to end the use of forged, dishonest or unreliable references by past or current Oxfam staff. Oxfam will not be issuing any formal references until this is in place.
• An immediate injection of money and resources into Oxfam’s safeguarding processes, with the number of people working in safeguarding more than doubling over the coming weeks and annual funding more than tripled to just over $1 million.
• A commitment to improve the culture within Oxfam to ensure that no one faces sexism, discrimination or abuse, that everyone, especially women, feels safe speaking out, and everyone is clear on what behavior is acceptable or not.

We are determined to remain strong and focused on our important work and commitment to our mission. I will work tirelessly to honor you, our caring supporters, through this difficult time as we face the ever-important fight still ahead: ending the injustice of poverty.

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It should not surprise anyone that the revelations of sexual misconduct in Oxfam’s Haiti office in 2011 rocked me. We have now heard of allegations of staff members in Chad using sex workers in 2006. And in response to these allegations, we learned on February 12 of the resignation of Penny Lawrence, the deputy chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain. As a leader accountable for safeguarding our staff, partners, and beneficiaries, as a woman, as a mother, and as a human being, I am appalled and dismayed. We are an organization of the highest principles and values. We serve and hold a mission that has as its center the protection of the most vulnerable in the world.

And, ashamed though I am of the behavior of these former staff, I am deeply committed to assuring that we will learn and uncover anything necessary from these events. New measures put in place help Oxfam better prevent abuse, sexual harassment, and exploitation from happening. Our response in the past clearly did not meet the standards that we have today. We could have done more including, but not limited to, sharing more information in our public communications.

Globally and at Oxfam America, we continue to have zero tolerance for abuse of people in any form and we offer our support to victims of these egregious violations of our principles, values, and what we hold dear and believe.

Oxfam’s priority is to stand fully by the survivors of such reprehensible behavior—and to ensure that such behavior is absolutely expunged from our organization. We stand firmly against the exploitation and abuse of women and girls.

I am proud to lead Oxfam America. I am proud of our staff who have, like me, felt shame and disappointment in their former colleagues but who are determined not to be discouraged.

My belief in Oxfam—Oxfam America and our entire confederation—has not wavered. I have known this organization through my work in this sector for more than 30 years. I know it to be an organization of the highest integrity. Now, from my vantage point within Oxfam, nothing has changed but my resolve that Oxfam will be the standard-bearer for the highest levels of safeguarding and for our unflagging commitment to the dignity of the people we serve.

We will work tirelessly to rebuild your trust—our incredible supporters, partners, and volunteers—who work together with us around the globe to fight the injustice of poverty. I am confident in our ability to weather this challenge together and remain deeply appreciative of your commitment to our shared vision of the future.

This blog has been updated with new information since it was published.

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Sara Klausner is an Organizing and Alliances intern at Oxfam America

Where were you when the travel ban happened? That was the question put to our panel of experts during an event marking the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s executive order suspending all refugee admissions to the United States for 120 days and citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen for 90 days.

It was a call to action for Oxfam’s refugee campaign advisor Isra Chaker. She took to social media to rally the public against Trump’s order slamming the door on refugees. Susan Cohen, chair of immigration practice at Boston law firm Mintz Levin, recalled seeing airports flooded with protests in support of the citizens from the seven banned countries. Cynthia Gabriel, senior director of organizing and activism at Amnesty International, discussed the forums that arose to open dialogue and halt misinformation. She watched young people and student groups mobilize to stand against bigotry. And, Jeffrey Thielman, CEO of the International Institute of New England, saw an upsetting increase in the number of cancelled resettlement cases.

Within two days of going into effect, a federal judge in New York blocked part of the order as a violation of citizens’ rights to due process and equal protection. By March 6, a new version of the ban was presented, which no longer included Iraqi citizens. This was met by a lawsuit from Hawaii and soon, a nationwide block. Currently, refugee admissions are set capped at 45,000—the lowest level in the history of the refugee resettlement program.

Sitting in the audience, I was struck by how this question resonated with a pattern observed throughout history. Each speaker easily placed themselves and their exact sentiments at the time of the travel ban’s announcement, the same way others can do when asked, “Where were you when JFK was shot?” Or, “What were you doing when the first tower fell?” The ability to clearly recall your thoughts and emotions in connection with one event is a powerful experience that reveals itself in times of profound change.

There is a revolution on its way and it’s time to “hand the mic over” (as Isra fervently emphasized we must do) to those who know the narrative. This isn’t my story, but as a fellow human, I’m excited to support the refugees whom it belongs to. Now more than ever, we must attend educational forums, partake in uncomfortable conversations, and yearn to correct our misunderstandings. If we do those things, we will be a generation that remembers where we were when we took back our country and shared it with those in need of refuge.

Read more about Oxfam’s refugee work.

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Out there on Boston Common, jammed in with tens of thousands of women and men, kids and dogs, awash in a sea of pink, I felt giddy with the power of all that it represented: the power people have when they stand up and speak out, together. For justice. For inclusion. For the rights of all women worldwide. What I saw was replicated by an estimated 3.2 million people in hundreds of cities across the US, not to mention thousands more on every continent (yes, they even marched in Antarctica).

What a glorious thing it is to have a voice—and to have the right to use it.

Many marchers carried signs. I carried a camera. And when the crowd finally loosened around the edges and streamed down Beacon Street, a story began to piece itself together, like letterpress on legs, each sign embossed on the day. Mostly it was a story of hope and determination, with the faces of walkers matching the messages that luffed and bobbed overhead. But there were darker sentiments, too.

At one point, I stopped on Commonwealth Avenue and snapped a photo of each sign that caught my eye—the keepers, I call them. But something was bothering me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, exactly, until Monday morning when I read Karen Stohr’s piece, Our New Age of Contempt, in the New York Times.

“Widespread public contempt has the potential to undermine the moral basis of all human relationships and, indeed, of human community itself,” Stohr wrote. At the march, there was a sprinkling of signs that derided the new administration and folks in it. Some were crude. Some were funny. I laughed, but I didn’t really feel like taking pictures of too many of those signs.

No question there is plenty to worry about with the direction President Donald Trump is dragging us all in—the door-shutting on refugees, immigrants, and people of color;  the disregard of climate change; the denigration of women—and that’s why we were all out there marching. But somehow I have the feeling that playing by his rules, with name-calling and peevishness, is only going to make me feel like him. No thanks. I want to be better than that. All of us need to be better than that—for the sake of the freedoms we hold dear.

“Returning contempt for contempt legitimizes its presence in the public sphere,” Stohr continued. “The only real defense against contempt is the consistent, strong, and loud insistence that each of us be regarded as a full participant in our shared political life, entitled to hold all others accountable for how we are treated.”

Oxfam had a collection of signs printed for the march, all of them aspirational. They carried messages like “We stand together for refugees,” and “We stand together to raise the wage.”

“Privately expressed contempt may be cathartic,” Stohr concluded. “Publicly expressed contempt, however, is perilous. . . . it threatens the foundations of our political community by denying the central moral idea on which that community is based—that everyone has a right to basic respect as a human being.”

If I had carried a sign, what would it have said? I like to think it would have echoed one of these keepers:

This post was originally published on January 24, 2017.

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Minor Sinclair is the director of Oxfam America’s US Domestic Program

The statue of Robert E. Lee is still standing in Charlottesville, Virginia, five months after the white nationalist protests that killed one and injured 19. You can’t see it today, however: the Confederate general and his horse are shrouded in black plastic and tied down with ropes. What will become of the monument is uncertain; while the City Council voted to remove it, the Sons of Confederate Veterans filed a lawsuit to block that move.

So the fate of the statue hangs in the balance – and, in some respects, so does the future of race relations and reparations in our country.

Growing up in Charlottesville, I never paid much attention to the statue; I didn’t associate the idealization of Confederate soldiers with the continued racial oppression of the day. We never thought that Charlottesville local heritage would one day become a national symbol for racism in America. Over time, I’ve learned that Confederate imagery is not fundamentally about pride of place and “heritage not hate.” Simply put, Confederate monuments serve to inspire and propagate the ideals of white supremacy.

As a child, I was simply not aware of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways that Confederate symbols (monuments, flags, names of public places) were used as tools to elevate whites and suppress blacks. I never imagined the daily humiliation of African American students attending a school named after Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee (or (Col.) Venable, the elementary school I attended, named after an aide to Lee and, embarrassingly, a family forebear).

While the outcry to preserve (and proliferate) Confederate monuments in Charlottesville—and Memphis and New Orleans and elsewhere–may not represent majority opinion, the swelling of white resentment is powerful, and frightening. Indeed, white supremacists have shrewdly tapped into the political, economic, and cultural fears of the white working class and Southerners, which have been stoked by job loss, demographic change, and erosion of white privilege. This is nothing new: every time African Americans take a step forward, there’s a move to push them back. Each wave of emancipation, economic advancement, and voting rights is met with poll taxes, redlining, job discrimination, voter suppression.

Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps more than any other resistance leader in the United States, understood the power of symbols to oppress — and, conversely, to liberate. When King led a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, he understood how to leverage imagery: blacks crossing the bridge to freedom, only to be violently beaten by a police force representing segregationists and Jim Crow policies.

“Shining moment”

“Selma, Alabama became a shining moment in the conscience of man,” King said to a crowd in Montgomery in 1965. “If the worst in American life lurked in its dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it. There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negros.”

Public symbols like monuments and school names should remind and inspire people of who we are as a society, what are our values and of what we are most proud. They should tell the truth. History should not be scrubbed or re-written to please the powerful. Instead, monuments like the Holocaust Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial remind us that the horrors of the past should never be repeated. Just one city, Montgomery, has 59 monuments and memorials to the Confederacy; it’s time to tear down the memorials to the oppressors and raise up the struggles of freedom and equality.

Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative are trying to do just that. They are building a museum and memorial on the site of a building that housed black slaves in Montgomery. They are memorializing the lives of the more than 4400 African American men, women, and children who were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

Rather than glorifying soldiers and war, they are honoring the lives lost to racism and injustice. To remember the pain, to tell the truth of what happened, and to proclaim state-sanctioned racist violence should never happen again.

As King noted, “In Alabama little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!” However, King did not just dream; he also challenged. These words are particularly poignant:  “It’s not the violence of the few that scares me; it’s the silence of the many.” 

Be vocal. Be active. Do justice.

On this MLK Day, a national day of service, I’ll be volunteering in Boston at the Pine Street Inn, which provides shelter to homeless men and women in the area. Find an opportunity near you.

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