Laura Emiko Soltis’ sense of justice developed early. As a teenager in rural Minnesota, she tended the cornfields with other working-class kids while Latinx migrant workers handled soybeans. “We would even eat lunch separately, and I remember wishing I could speak with them,” she recalls.
In her international relations classes at UGA, Soltis started to think critically about her experience and eventually joined the Student Farmworker Alliance to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization. “While I obtained my PhD from Emory University, I received my political education from Mexican, Maya, and Haitian migrant workers in the tomato fields of South Florida,” Soltis says. “They taught me that change requires both consciousness and commitment.”
Both qualities are key to Soltis’ work at Freedom University, a modern-day freedom school for undocumented students banned from equal access to higher education in Georgia. Soltis first joined as a volunteer staff member in 2013, but in June 2014, the school closed when the founding faculty left. Just three months later, Soltis reopened it with a human rights framework whose objective is to restore dignity to students. “We began fighting back—empowering students to assert their human rights and leading campaigns to create their own pathways to higher education,” she says.
Human rights may be the cornerstone of the university, but Soltis emphasizes that collective action is the true path to change. To this end, she invited key participants like Atlanta Civil Rights activist Lonnie C. King Jr. to strategize with students. “These individuals desegregated the same public universities in the early ’60s that are now banning undocumented students,” Soltis says.
While her pupils may speak different languages and have different immigration statuses, they are all part of a community. “The best part of my day is hearing their laughter and knowing that despite the bigotry they experience, from nearly every corner of society and every level of government, they find so much joy when they are together.” – TESS MALONE
