Listen Live
Praise Charlotte App Graphics
Praise 100.9 Featured Video
CLOSE

Dorothy Counts-Scoggins encountered Woody Cooper more than half a decade ago.  It was September 4, 1957, and she was integrating Harding High School.  As she walked to the door of the school she was taunted and spit on by members of Harding’s then all-white student body.  Woody Cooper was among them.  Although he did not shout any derogatory comments or throw any objects, he felt responsible for the treatment she received that day.

WTVI and the Red Bench Ambassadors are giving Cooper an opportunity to reconcile his personal feelings of guilt and regret.

On June 10 from 11:30 am to 1 pm at Mahlon Adams Pavilion at Freedom Park (2435 Cumberland Avenue, Charlotte, NC), WTVI and the Red Bench Ambassadors will dedicate Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness to celebrate the end of The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness and provide a place where the community can experience love and peace.  The Garden of Forgiveness will include the Red Bench of Love, a tangible symbol of the Love & Forgiveness campaign.

Dorothy Counts-Scoggins and Woody Cooper will be the first to experience the Red Bench of Love in Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness as Cooper apologizes to Counts-Scoggins during the ceremony.

“Charlotte’s Garden of Forgiveness will be a place for our mothers to experience love instead of grief; our fathers to experience hope instead of anger, our teens to experience peace instead of violence, our leaders to experience reconciliation instead of payback, and our seniors to experience joy instead of bitterness,” said Beverly Dorn-Steele, WTVI’s community outreach director. “WTVI and the Red Bench Ambassadors view the Garden of Forgiveness as a healing place for our grieving families to begin to find love and forgiveness.”

What is the Campaign for Love & Forgiveness?

Love & Forgiveness is a community engagement project of the Fetzer Institute that encourages people to bring love and forgiveness into the heart of individuals and community life.

Since January 2007, WTVI has coordinated a series of community group conversations in partnership with the Stratford Richardson YMCA Youth Council, the Women Inter-Cultural Exchange, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee, Afro American Cultural Center Roundtable Fellow Artists and the WTVI Community Engagement Committee. Collectively the group is known as The Red Bench Ambassadors.

Through the facilitated conversations, personal explorations and other activities, participants have learned to:

  • Forgive themselves for mistakes
  • Forgive others who are close to them
  • Consider offering forgiveness as a response to a difficult situation
  • Talk with friends about forgiveness or being more forgiving
  • Choose to forgive someone rather than being angry at them

More than 95 participants have reported that they experienced remarkable breakthroughs around their challenging relationships with families, friends, spouses and co-workers as a result of these conversations. In addition to conversations and events, the red bench has become an icon, catalyst, and place for Charlotte residents to sit and share stories of love and forgiveness. It also served as inspiration for a locally-produced theatrical event and the Garden of Forgiveness.

The garden dedication is free and open to the public, but participants must reserve a seat.  To confirm your intention to attend, please contact WTVI Community Outreach Director Beverly Dorn-Steele at 704.371.8840 or bds@wtvi.org.