With the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the masses have finally woken up to the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets--during a Pandemic--to protest against racist policies and practices that stretch across American society, with the police departments in virtually every city providing ample real-time evidence of the scope of the problem.

It felt wrong, during this time, to fill the discourse with the normal programming of white people talking about how to get into Sundance, so we went dark for a little bit. But staying silent has historically not worked even a little bit, so for the latest episode of "I Really Should Be Working," I'm talking to my old college professor, Dr. Todd Allen of Messiah College.

Dr. Allen organizes one of the longest-running Civil Rights bus tours in the country, taking busses full of people from Pennsylvania through the major landmarks of the Movement, including Greensboro, Atlanta, Selma, Birmingham, Memphis, and Little Rock.

When I got out of college, I went on the tour for 2 years and it was an eye-opening experience for a white boy from Maine. I met more icons of the Movement than I could have ever imagined, people like Rep. John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Rev. Billy Kyles, Joanne Bland, and Rev. Robert Graetz.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of education as a tool to fight racism, the power of standing in a place where history happened, the role of poverty in racism, how the Movement never ended, the factors that made this murder stand out, what Martin Luther King would be doing today, and so much more.

Learn more about the Returning to the Roots of Civil Rights bus tour here: https://www.facebook.com/Returning-To-The-Roots-Of-Civil-Rights-Tour-178712595495361/

Follow Dr. Allen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommProfTA

And check out the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Birmingham: https://eji.org/

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