![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2022\/08\/20180112_MLK_TutuCommunityBreakfast-89.jpg\")
Shekinah Lightner \u201920, president of Furman NAACP, speaks to breakfast attendees.<\/p><\/div>\n
Shekinah Lightner \u201920, president of Furman NAACP, spoke to the group shortly before Tutu.<\/p>\n
The community \u201cneeds citizens who will rebel against the notion that the success of the individual is more important than the success of the community, because the two are inextricably linked,\u201d Lightner said.<\/p>\n
Tutu began her remarks by addressing Lightner and Tyana Davis \u201921, who brought tears to many eyes with her acapella rendition of \u201cHis Eye is on the Sparrow.\u201d Tutu called the younger women\u2019s work \u201camazing\u201d and \u201cawesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI see today black girl magic,\u201d she said. The audience agreed with loud applause.<\/p>\n
Tutu\u2019s key note presentation, Truth & Reconciliation: Healing the Wounds of Racism, was built around lessons she learned watching South Africa\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission conduct its work as the country began its post-apartheid life.<\/p>\n
Her first reaction to horrific accounts of torture and murder was, \u201cThank goodness I\u2019m not like that.\u201d But then she began to wonder what was buried inside her humanity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt does not help us to put the evil out there on that \u2018other,\u2019 \u2026 we need to accept that that possibility of evil resides in each of us,\u201d Tutu said. \u201cGiven the right circumstances, almost all of us are willing to impose suffering on other human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second, more hopeful, lesson came as she listened to survivors and victims\u2019 families choose, as compensation for unimaginable pain, services that would benefit their communities, not themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese were not people who were born with a saintly gene that the rest of us don\u2019t have,\u201d Tutu said. \u201cWho they were was tied up with who their community was \u2026 each of us can be that person.\u201d<\/p>\n
These first lessons were intensely personal. But Tutu also began to see the importance of truth within a community\u2013or a state or a nation.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/218\/2022\/08\/20180112_MLK_TutuCommunityBreakfast-4.jpg\")
Faculty, staff, students and community members attended the breakfast which is part of Furman’s MLK celebration “Building the Beloved Community.”<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cYou cannot pick and choose your history,\u201d she said. As an observer and then a parent of school-aged children, she was and remains troubled by history education in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch of history in this country is taught to make us proud,\u201d she said. The next generation will not be prepared to live in and work for a more just world \u201cif we don\u2019t share with them the times and experiences when human dignity did not apply to all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, through a young white man who acknowledged that his ignorance of what had been happening all around him was willful, Tutu learned we all choose which truths we will see in ourselves and our communities. She urged the audience to make the courageous choice and acknowledge the difficult truths.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we find the courage to tell our own truth and to listen to the truth\u2013particularly to truth of those we know as \u2018other,\u2019 then we can start the path of reconciliation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Read Shekinah Lightner’s remarks<\/a> or view the full schedule for Furman University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Truth is the only road to genuine racial reconciliation, Nontombi Naomi Tutu said Friday. And then she laid some ground rules: Truth with ourselves, truth with the community and truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":17667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversity-equity-and-inclusion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}