Center for Religion & Civic Culture

Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray is among many distinguished speakers at From the Ashes: The 1992 Civil Unrest and the Rise of Social Movement Organizing event on Thursday, April 26th at the USC Davidson Conference Center

The all-day event, co-sponsored by CRCC, will look back and, more importantly, for a look forward at what the lessons of social movement organizing in Los Angeles might mean for a national agenda and the emerging social movement possibilities symbolized by (but not limited to) Occupy Wall Street.

April 29, 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. And just as the media missed much of the real story then - portraying it as a "Black-white" or “Black-Korean” conflict, downplaying the pervasive economic distress that drove the unrest, and focusing on divisive racial politics in the immediate aftermath - reporters are likely to swoop into the city as they have on previous anniversaries, trekking to the communities hardest hit in search of continued conflict, tension, and poverty.

The event is organized by the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity in collaboration with: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Community Coalition (CoCo), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), Labor/Community Strategy Center, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE), and UCLA Labor Center.

The event is made possible with funding from the California Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Liberty Hill Foundation, New World Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Solidago Foundation, Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, USC Dana and David Dornsife College, and USC Office of the Provost.

To attend the event, RSVP here.