Atlanta: Coca Cola, Mr. King, and SUSI 2018

To be honest, I would not have wished for any other day to write this blog post except the day we travel. Traveling is my passion and it has changed me as a person over the course of years. I feel more like a global citizen who tends to have a national identity, but that identity does not define me as a person. The way I have developed my perception about life is that this universe is too big to care about boundaries which divide us as people.

The Journey to Atlanta:

We started our chartered bus journey from our dorms in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The journey was comfortable, and we experienced the American freeways for the very first time. Everyone was excited about the day ahead and the weather was on our side too. Our destination for the day was the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta is widely known as the birthplace of civil rights movement in the U.S., but the hustling city has much more to offer now than it ever did.

Atlanta is the capital of the state of Georgia and has an estimated population of 463,878 people. SUSI leaders visited two important sites in the city. Our first stop was at the World of Coca Cola, which is an exhibition museum to showcase the history and evolution of Coca Cola. The Coca Cola was invented by John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, so the city takes huge pride for hosting the company with one of the most loved global brands of all times.

It was full of amazing art galleries and activities like a 4D theatre, gift shop, vintage advertisement exhibition, and most importantly, the section to test Coca Cola products from all over the world. In addition to these, a lot of other very interesting and cool things were on display which played an important role in making coke a global brand. All the student leaders enjoyed variety of beverages to get the best out of the coke experiences. There were beverages from Africa, Europe, South America and Asia. One just cannot get enough of it!

For our lunch break, we visited the CNN center in downtown. The building was full of restaurants which offered a variety of dining options. Many students utilized this break to quickly visit the down town of Atlanta before our next tour to The Center for Civil and Human Rights also known as ‘Civil Rights Museum of Atlanta’.

The Civil Rights Museum of Atlanta was such an awe-inspiring place for each of us to be in. The museum had been designed in a very informative way and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been honored with highest respect as the father of civil rights movement in the U.S. All of us have heard his name in our home countries at some point but reading about his life and struggle in this museum made our hearts heavier as we proceeded to the next sections of the museum.

The museum was uniquely designed to give the audience audio, visual, recorded and printed evidence of racism, gender bias, segregation and the struggle which African Americans had to endure. Everyone who came out of the Civil Rights Museum had a heavy heart for what they came to know about. The segregation of colored and whites, the freedom riders, the civil rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the atrocities which are being committed against humans in today’s world. The final section of the museum was all about current human rights situation across the globe and I felt that it was there to emphasize the fact that we have not learned anything from the past and people continue to carry out atrocities against humans without revisiting their past.