Our Last Five Minutes: Human Rights Demand Our Full Humanity

September 15th, 2025

Alice Walker once wrote, “Our last five minutes on earth are running out. We can spend those minutes in meanness, exclusivity, and self-righteous disparagement of others or we can spend them with compassion and forgiveness. There's really nothing in between.”

Those words are not just poetry; they are prophecy. They ask us to choose, at every moment, whether we will walk in the dignity of our shared humanity or in the shadows of fear, resentment, and hate.

Today, marks the 62nd anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a hateful act of terror that stole the lives of four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Their last minutes on earth were taken by the very forces Alice Walker warns us about: meanness, exclusivity, and self-righteous hate. The world saw, in the most devastating way, the cost of cruelty when it is normalized, funded, and excused.

Sixty-two years later, the question remains: have we learned? Because we still live in an age where some voices are loud, well-funded, and amplified, seek to diminish the humanity of others under the guise of protecting “values” or “freedom.” They mock human rights, belittle diversity, and twist faith into a weapon rather than a wellspring of love. They manufacture outrage as a business model, and in doing so, they normalize cruelty.

But we must remember that cruelty is not strength. Exclusivity is not morality. Self-righteous disparagement is not truth. The work of human rights is about restoring what has always belonged to all of us, the right to be, to breathe, to live without fear of being silenced, excluded, or erased.

We do not have the luxury of neutrality. As Walker reminds us, there is nothing in between. Every time we choose compassion over contempt, inclusion over exclusion, forgiveness over vengeance, we tilt the moral arc closer to justice.

I think of the civil rights pioneers, the labor leaders, the women, the LGBTQIA+ trailblazers, the disabled organizers, the immigrants, the working poor and yes, those four little girls in Birmingham, AL, who stood as witnesses to what hate can destroy, and what love can build. In their own “last five minutes,” they left a legacy of courage and love. What will we choose?

Scripture reminds us: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Live a life where no one will ever have to say, as Dr. Vernon Johns of Dexter Ave Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, once said at a funeral: “He lived like a dog, he died like a dog. Undertaker, come claim the body.”

May our last five minutes and every minute before them be spent in compassion, justice, and love.