The Community Empowerment Network of Hot Springs held a public forum Thursday evening to educate the community on African American culture and its start in the United States to hopefully provide a solution to the racial discrimination Black people in America face in 2020, event coordinator James Lowery said.
The forum, which included insight from Lowery, Maurice Bradford and Tyrone Burnell, was recorded and posted to The Community Empowerment Network of Hot Springs' Facebook Page.
With the topic of "Unifying the Community in 2020," the forum focused on three subjects: Literacy, dehumanization and Pan Africanism.
"The community had been coming together to try to find out why there's so many shootings all of a sudden, why there's so much violence during this pandemic, but I knew why it was," Lowery said. "There's still a lot of, in the 21st century and in 2020 there's still a lot of illiteracy going on and there's still the effects of slavery. You would think, after this long time, that it would be over the effects of slavery."
He said literacy is the key to education, noting most low-income people are dehumanized, which leads to illiteracy and tends to have more of an effect on Black children than white children.
"When your rights have been taken away by humanity, you lose who you are; you lose your identity as a human being," Lowery said about African Americans being brought to the United States to be enslaved.
As for learning of Pan Africanism, he said it's important for people to know what gives African Americans their culture.
"First you have to talk about the history, then you have to talk about why things are (the way they are) for poor people and African Americans today -- and there has to be the solution," Lowery said. "Regardless of the reason why all this happened, you still have to be, as a man, accountable for your own actions at the end of the day, regardless of what has happened, because you can't change history."
He said he hopes the result of the forum is people of all races becoming more educated on African Americans' past and present culture and hardships.
"When people understand who each other are they tend to have a collaboration of ideas," Lowery said. "See, we in America are a melting pot; even though we have our different cultures, we blend together as one United States of America."
"The culture plays a very big part in your self-identity," he said. "So if you don't know what that culture is, you're going to be confused and there's going to be a distortion there. So the purpose of having the forum is to start to educate people and to start making headway from what history was. To start changing in the present and into the future."
Although none are currently scheduled, Lowery said they plan to have more forums on the subject of promoting unity within the community.
"See, what happens is, once you have one, the objective of it is to get as much accomplished as you can, and then you have a progress report," he said, "because all this that happens is not going to change overnight -- It's going to take time."