Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The Black Belt Community Foundation’s (BBCF) Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Selma Program and partners at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Racial Healing (SCNTR) partnered for a day of service on Martin Luther King Day Monday.

The two groups and other volunteers set up at the Edmundite Missions’ BOSCO Nutrition Center to distribute bags with winter clothing such as hats and gloves along with soap and hand sanitizer.

“We’re still in the midst of a pandemic,” said Selma SCNTR Community Organizer Mark Myles. “A lot of people’s families are having a tough time right now so we just wanted to help in any possible and we know Dr. King would be doing the same. We want to honor his legacy while assisting the community.”

Myles referenced King’s idea of the “Beloved Community” – an idea envisioning a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings – which Myles says the SCNTR teaches and practices regularly.

“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” said King.

“We believe, in the Beloved Community, that everyone has value,” he said. “There is no hierarchy of human value. Every person, no matter their color, no matter their sex or their socioeconomic status, they really matter and they should be provided with every resource possible to succeed.”