Our Share the Plate partner for the month of May is Black Votes Matter Institute which funds and conducts an annual educational tour for 40 Omaha high school students to visit more than 15 Southern civil rights venues. The tour includes the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where a bombing killed four young girls in 1963. The 2018 tour is planned for June 17 to 23. There has been numerous pre-tour events to give the high schoolers the perspective to better understand the significance of the civil rights landmarks they’ll be seeing. Tour Objective is to develop potential leaders.
Preston Love, the founder and director of Black Votes Matter and an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, founded the Black Votes Matter Institute. Preston will be the guest at our May 6th First Hour to tell us about the Institute, the tour, and other efforts by his Black Votes Matter organization.
Please join us for First Hour at 9:00 am Sunday, May 6th, and give generously to the Share the Plate offering during May to help Black Votes Matter Institute and our church.
Additional Background Information
Preston Love, the founder and director of Black Votes Matter and an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, founded the Black Votes Matter Institute to fund and conduct an annual educational tour for 40 Omaha high school students to visit more than 15 Southern civil rights venues, including the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where a bombing killed four young girls in 1963. The 2018 tour is planned for June 17 to 24. There has been numerous pre-tour events to give the high schoolers the perspective to better understand the significance of the civil rights landmarks they’ll be seeing. Tour Objective is to develop potential leaders. The students were nominated by north Omaha youth groups, like 100 Black Men of Omaha, Girls Inc., Avenue Scholars and the Heartland Workers Center, Hope Center and more. The need is based on the fact that our youth need civic and historical foundation to inspire to lead, advocate and stay in Omaha.
Preston Love Jr. has worked with and collaborated off and on with OTOC for years. Second Unitarian Church has supported the Black Lives Matters program for several years as exemplified by the banner on the north exterior wall of the church.
Unless we invest in our youth from poverty areas, we stand the risk of losing their gifts, focus to the looming alternatives, of crime and more. The Tour we plant seeds that the communities will reap when they return. We have African Americans, Latino, white and South Sudanese as part of the students traveling.
Based on experience from previous tours, the Annual Civil Rights Tour gives the participating high schoolers the perspective to better understand the historical significance of the civil rights movement based on the landmarks they’ll be seeing and the stories they will hear. In 2015 several Omaha youth travel to Selma (50th anniversary), one Maurice Jones was so impacted he returned while in high school and ran for city council and is the prototype of the effects of the tour. This will help participants become future leaders that will be sensitive to, educated on and inspired by civil rights history. Link to Oct. 23, 2017 article about the tour.