New Atlanta Museum Exhibit Features Soccer, Human Rights

Many of the international visitors who made the trip to Atlanta for the World Cup matches here this summer have had a chance to see soccer as more than just an exciting sporting match. Thanks to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, they’ve also had an opportunity to see how the game has transformed social and political relationships around the world.

In anticipation of the crowds that filled Arthur Blank’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the civil rights museum, which is within walking distance of the stadium, began planning last year for their newest exhibit, “The Peoples Game.” It’s the story of how soccer has often been more than a sporting match, it’s been a way to create community, enhance human dignity and help to create social change.

The exhibit was put together by Daniel Fuller, a passionate soccer fan who has spent a good part of his adult life chasing after the sport in trips around the world. Now, Fuller, who is the museum’s director of curation, has used his deep interest in the game to show how the worldwide soccer phenomenon has been harnessed to create real change.

“I wanted to counteract a lot of the sensational headlines about soccer and its fans,” Fuller said, “and to show that soccer and the worldwide campaign for human rights are not two separate things.”

The new exhibit is in the wing of the building that was opened last year, after Arthur Blank stepped in with a $25 million donation to jump start the building fund. The Blank Family Foundation also provided a matching grant to cover some of the cost of creating the new exhibit.

“We are proud to support an exhibition,” Blank said, “that reflects Atlanta’s spirit of inclusion and service.”

What Fuller has brought together in the new space which will run for the next year, is also how soccer and its fans have often changed history. He points, for example, to the role that the Corinthians, an important Brazilian soccer team in Sao Paulo, Brazil, played an important political role in the early 1980s. An authoritarian military dictatorship had seized power in the country and ended democratic rule.

The Corinthians, led by the soccer star Socrates Oliveira, created a movement to help restore democracy in Brazil.

“Every week before the match started, they voted on who was going to be the players playing that week,” Fuller commented. “They voted on if they would have water breaks. They voted on how they would get to the game, whether it would be the team bus or if they would walk or take the subway. They did all of this voting to show people this is what democracy is like.”

Every member of the soccer club had an equal voice, players, coaching staff, management that became part of an experiment that set out to prove that democracy. Corinthian Democracy, as the movement was called, was not dead in the country. According to Fuller, the movement played an important role in changing Brazilian politics then.

In another important moment in the history of soccer and human rights, Fuller points to the West African nation of Ivory Coast. In 2005, the nation was beset by a violent civil war that had fractured the country’s political structure. An influential soccer star for the national team, Didier Drogba, stepped in after a winning match that carried the team into World Cup competition for the first time.

In a dramatic dressing room appeal on national television, he fell to his knees and asked that all those fighting to “forgive, forgive, forgive, stop firing the guns.” The pleas led to a cease fire, the first time peace had come to the country in years.

Closer to home, the exhibit describes the years-long struggle of America’s world champion women’s professional soccer players to achieve pay parity with men; and the role that soccer played in helping the large immigrant community in the Atlanta metropolitan area of Clarkston adjust to their new lives in America.

In so many ways, soccer, according to Fuller, has been an engine of creating community to bring about change.

“We have this idea that like at some point government will step in or a politician will step in with some sort of help, but a lot of times what is more likely is that people come together in community. So that sense of community is created to help people, long before the politicians know what to do. It’s taking a village, right? To take care of one another.”

Soccer, as the exhibit at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights seems to imply, is a powerful way to build that village for change.