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GLIDE's Alabama Justice Pilgrimage

The Alabama Pilgrimage is an immersive, experiential learning program of GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice (CSJ) that seeks to tell the truth about American history, highlight inequities in health, economic, and criminal justice outcomes, articulate connections between slavery and mass incarceration, and interrupt current, incomplete narratives about oppression, crime, and punishment.

This five-day transformational journey is central to GLIDE’s work to heal the wounds of enduring racism and economic inequality in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and beyond.

On February 17-22, 2024, we went back on our fifth Pilgrimage with a select group of local healthcare leaders.

Learn more about the Alabama Pilgrimage program participants.

Key visits included: 

    • 16th Street Baptist Church services, Kelly Ingram Park, opening session, dinner at Ballard House

    • University of Alabama Medical Center, Sewage Justice, Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma Center for Non-violence, check-in to Selma Hotel

    • Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, National Memorial for Peace and Justice

    • Individual and small group processing; Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey: The Mothers of Gynecology; closing session

    •  Brown AME Chapel + full day at Tuskegee University

Click on Rabbi Michael Lezak’s Alabama Pilgrimage message to GLIDE’s Board of Directors below.

michael, alabama, rabbi

Click on Senior Director of the CSJ Naeemah Charles’ blog post and read about her Alabama experience.

Click on UCSF Associate Director, Center for Community Engagement & Senior Staff, Roberto Vargas’s blog post about his Alabama Pilgrimage experience

roberto vargas, ucsf

View Photos from past GLIDE pilgrimages to Montgomery, Alabama

Videos of Ms. Mary Anne Pettway and Ms. China Pettway of the Gee’s Bend Quilter’s Collective in Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

The Legacy of Justice, Equality and Love for All Lives On

It was like camp…

by Kendra Hypolite

kendra, poet, poem

If camp meant 12-14 hour days 

If camp meant spending more time with your colleagues than ever before

If camp meant crying as your confront and reflect on this country’s history of slavery through mass incarceration.  

If camp meant spending hours on a bus driving through rural Alabama.  

If camp meant being vulnerable with people you barely knew 3 days before

If camp meant processing for hours each day about the people you met, the images you saw, and the stories you heard.

If camp meant sharing space with people from UCSF that you would never have had the opportunity to be with in another setting.  

If camp meant feeling like you’re leaving Alabama a changed person but you’re not sure how

If camp meant you got to witness the resilience, courage, resourcefulness and joy of Black people, especially other Black women.  

If camp meant every day you thought about how you can take this experience back the Bay, back to your home, back to your workplace and use it to propel you forward in the work towards racial and health equity.

It was like camp.