Reclaiming Our Voices Through Counterstories: We Shall Overcome

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” -Chimamanda Adichie

The sharing of counterstories provides a powerful opportunity for critical hope among students and teachers to reimagine their educational environments in order to transform and reclaim them. Utah NAME strongly believes that this reclamation of concealed stories and histories is essential to humanizing educational spaces. Through the telling of these counterstories, we hope to provide all attendees the opportunity to explore the silenced voices and invisible experiences that are historically excluded in educational texts and curricula.

Keynote:

Donzaleigh Abernathy is the youngest daughter of the American Civil Rights Movement Co-Founder Rev. Dr. Ralph David and Mrs. Juanita Jones Abernathy. She was born in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement as her Father and his best friend, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. established the nonviolent social movement which changed the course of American History. Her life began with the bombing of her parents’ home and her Father’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. She and her siblings witnessed and participated in all of the major Civil Rights Movements and Marches, including the Freedom Riders, the March On Washington, the Selma to Montgomery March for “The Right to Vote” and the Chicago Housing Demonstrations. The Abernathy and King children integrated Spring Street Elementary School which led to mass integration of schools in the South in 1965. She witnessed from her home the integral decisions that helped shape American Laws with the creation of the Civil Rights Bill, the Public Accommodations Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Affirmative Action, the National Food Stamp Program, the Free Meal Program for Low Income Students and the creation of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. In 2004, she authored, Partners To History, Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and the Civil Rights Movement which was nominated as one of the “Best Books for Young Adults” by the American Library Association. She was a contributing author to the Smithsonian Institute’s book In the Spirit of Martin. Her play Birmingham Sunday is a winner of the Tanne Foundation Award.