RALEIGH -- The federal justice department needs to - and will - take up the cause for equality, just as young civil rights workers did a half century ago, the U.S. attorney general said Saturday.
"There is still work to be done. This justice department will be about that work," Eric Holder Jr. promised in a speech at Raleigh's First Baptist Church on Wilmington Street.
Holder was the keynote speaker of this weekend's conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group, an integral part of the civil rights movement, was formed when student leaders gathered at Shaw University in April 1960.
Holder said he is strengthening the civil rights division of the justice department, which has the ability to investigate and prosecute hate crimes as well as discrimination that violates housing, employment and voting laws. He acknowledged that the legal system has not always delivered in its role of protecting justice.
The first African-American to lead the U.S. Department of Justice, Holder thanked those in the crowd who, as young college students, challenged segregation in the South, often risking their lives. Without such sacrifices, Holder said, neither he nor President Barack Obama would be where they are today.
"There is a direct line from that lunch counter to the Oval Office," Holder said, referring to the four N.C. A&T University students who demanded in February 1960 that they be served at the whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth store in Greensboro. The sit-in is credited with helping spark the civil rights movement, and similar sit-ins popped up across the nation.
With three months, on April 15, 1960, college students from across the South gathered at Shaw University and formed SNCC.
Though Holder was the keynote speaker, it was John Lewis, the former SNCC chairman, now a Georgia congressman, who brought the crowd of several hundred to their feet as he called out to former SNCC colleagues in the audience, thanking them for risking their lives as they rode buses to challenge segregated bus stations, registered black voters in Mississippi and suffered beatings as they marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
Lewis also told of how he was recently asked whether Obama's election was the realization of what he and others had fought for.
"It's a down-payment," he said.
Tears slipped down cheeks in the audience as Lewis paused to thank JamesChaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers killed in the summer of 1964 as they headed to investigate the burning of a black church in Mississippi.
Lewis urged his SNCC colleagues to speak out against continuing injustices.
"You've gone through the worst," he told the group. "You've been thrown in jail, you've been beaten.
"What can anyone do to you now? Make some noise."
Today's events include music in the Shaw University chapel at 9:30 a.m., followed by a speech at 10 a.m. from Robert Moses, who once traveled the South registering black voters for SNCC. The conference ends at noon.
