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Friend,
When a series of devastating tornadoes hit Alabama last month, Tafeni English-Relf had been director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new state office for just five weeks. With space not yet chosen for the new operation, she was still shuttling between her former digs at SPLC headquarters and her home.
But English-Relf is not the type who waits for office furniture to arrive before getting to work. Less than 12 hours after the twisters hit central Alabama, she was in Selma, the flashpoint of the civil rights movement. Wending her way through live wires, past collapsed buildings, overturned cars and metal roofing wrapped around telephone poles by violent winds, she said her heart was heavy and her thoughts were racing with the urgency of need in a city she loves.
Three days later, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, English-Relf was back in Selma with a plan. She brought two other SPLC senior leaders, 400 bottles of water and a list of action items for the SPLC: to allocate thousands of dollars to aid efforts, provide free legal services and set up mobile mental health clinics for displaced residents. She would also organize donations and take them weekly to Selma and other areas of the state where the tornadoes caused horrific loss of life and property.
“Immediately, I thought about the (Hurricane) Katrina catastrophe and how long a recovery that has been. I thought, we won’t wait for help,” English-Relf said. “We are going to be stepping up in Selma early and quick. We are going to be there to provide to the community and residents. Aside from addressing the needs for toiletries and food and water, the necessities that they need right now, we are also really going to be working to add to their resilience. Because the people are very hopeful that this will be an opportunity to get it right for Selma, and for Alabama.”
A collaborative model
Getting it right for Alabama. That may be the best possible distillation of English-Relf’s goals for the SPLC’s Alabama state office.
The SPLC is not a relief organization. The federal and state governments and the American Red Cross, along with other large-scale disaster response organizations, will be the major players in managing the immediate needs of the regions devastated by the storms.
The SPLC’s Alabama state office is designed to bring a different sort of relief to places like Selma. Employing a collaborative model that the storied 52-year-old racial justice organization has been developing over the past several years, the office under English-Relf’s leadership will partner with established local advocacy and community organizations to get it right for Alabama over the long term.
The office is the second of several planned by the SPLC to be grounded in that collaborative model. The first SPLC state office opened in Mississippi in May 2022 and has become a launching pad for training grassroots advocates, partnering with community organizations and confronting a variety of struggles facing the state, including the water crisis in Jackson that is steeped in systemic racism.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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