Friend,
When the grassy expanses and the shaded walkways radiating from the Lincoln Memorial and its Reflecting Pool fill up this weekend to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, the gathered throngs calling on the federal government to protect voting rights will carry with them the weight of countless individual journeys.
Among them will be Zuley Yepez, whose intergenerational pathway to the march one might call particularly long. Her mother walked to the U.S. from war-torn Nicaragua in the 1980s and her father fled the civil war in El Salvador. Yepez, a soft-spoken former Marine studying to become an immigration attorney, is the first to insist she is not one of the “heroes” who will be at the Aug. 26 commemoration. She reserves that distinction for the Black civil rights leaders, old and young, she reveres.
But in her fierce desire to protect the rights of those who, like her family, seek new lives in the U.S., Yepez has undertaken a journey that is both inspired by and representative of the dream Martin Luther King Jr. expressed to the 250,000 people at the 1963 gathering.
“The people that were part of the Civil Rights Movement, it’s because of them that immigrants were able to become citizens in this country and to advocate legally for our own rights,” said Yepez, 32. “If it wasn’t for the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, everything that followed, the rest of us wouldn’t have our civil rights protected.”
Yepez is one of 45 fellows of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Advocacy Institute who are traveling to Washington this weekend as part of a large and diverse SPLC delegation, including SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang, who is scheduled to speak at the event.
Grassroots activists, students, entrepreneurs, formerly incarcerated men and women, lawyers and judges among them, the Advocacy Institute fellows come from vastly different backgrounds and have traveled many different journeys. What unites them is the desire to make change. And they all know that access to the ballot is the key to unlocking change across the array of inequities that challenge their communities.
“We are in a state of crisis in our country, and for the past two years the SPLC has been committed to ensuring that when we think about this fight for democracy, that the people are not lost in that equation,” said Waikinya Clanton, director of the SPLC’s Mississippi state office.
“That is why we committed the resources to creating the Advocacy Institute,” Clanton said. “We are thrilled to come to Washington not only to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, but to play our role in the continued fight for voting rights in this country.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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