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Charlottesville Civil Rights Pilgrimage Stops in Greensboro

The group's goal is to deliver soil collected from an 1898 Charlottesville lynching site to a memorial for peace and justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

07/08/18 — GREENSBORO, N.C. (WFMY)-- A group of more than 100 community members from in and around Charlottesville started their journey this morning.

The group's goal is to deliver soil collected from an 1898 Charlottesville lynching site to a memorial for peace and justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Along the way, they'll make stops to learn more about the nation's history with racism, including two stops in Greensboro.

Don Gathers, an activist who's part of the group, says it's a much needed conversation with the current racial tension in the country.


"It's problematic. It's scary because I have three young sons who have to, have to deal with this world. And, and I truly grieve for them and any other young men and women of color that have to go through what's, what's happening to this country right now," says Gathers.

The group is visiting civil rights sites in various southern communities, encouraging people to learn more about the nation's history of racial divide.

"Part of it is we just don't understand our history and we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So we are actually making the pilgrimage in order for us to change the narrative and change our public spaces, which are right now dominated by confederate statues," says group member Frank Duke, a professor at the University of Virginia.

In Greensboro, the group will learn more about the sit-ins during the civil rights movement.

"Greensboro's history would indicate that civil rights and justice and doing what is just and right in terms of people, is, has an indelible mark here in Greensboro, due to the civil rights movement, which I happened to have been a part of. I was at Bennett College at the time," says Mayor Pro Tem, Yvonne Johnson.

Gathers hopes the community will learn from past mistakes and change the future.

"That they will embrace it with the same amount of energy that we have. To try to learn this country's horrible and sickening past. And that the true story can be told," says Gathers.

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