Reviews and Recommendations
"I ... came away from this workshop with a renewed, greater, deeper, and more tactile understanding of the struggle for justice."
Bob Dockhorn
Friends General Conference Workshop, Iowa, July 2011
"At a time, in the 1950s and 1960s, when moral truth was on the side of the racial justice but governments were equivocating, the techniques of nonviolent resistance were powerful means for bringing forth change and redressing injustice. Charles Walker, Brenda Beadenkopf’s father, was a skillful practitioner and teacher of these methods in the 1960s and for decades afterwards."
"Brenda is carrying forward the teaching of these methods, which are applicable not only for achieving social change but also for addressing more or less confrontational situations that occur frequently in human interaction, even within families.
I was able to experience Brenda’s work in a workshop at a national Quaker gathering in Grinnell, Iowa, in 2011, where a group of adults and youths acted in a role-play of the scene on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus where Rosa Parks’ arrest ignited the civil rights movement. I played the role of the bus driver and struggled with the conflicting emotions he felt. In this role-play, all the participants, in whatever part they acted out, had the opportunity to place themselves inside the parties to a conflict and feel the struggle between reason, emotion, and convention. I, and I think others, came away from this workshop with a renewed, greater, deeper, and more tactile understanding of the struggle for justice."
Bob Dockhorn, Friends Journal Senior Editor, 2001-2011
Niles Daily Star reports on Brenda's workshops--US, Africa-- April, 2012.
"In the past few years, she has been speaking and giving workshops in southwest Michigan at local churches, Black History events, diversity luncheons and the Niles NAACP on the subject of “Charlie Walker and the Spiritual Basis of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Additionally, she has held this workshop at several Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Summer Sessions, Friends General Conference in Iowa and will be conducting it again at this FWCC Conference, teaching Friends all over the world how American Quakers worked to help keep the American Civil Rights Movement nonviolent." Read the article at Niles Daily Star April 4, 2012
Brenda brought the story of her father’s work in civil rights to a Diversity Luncheon at Riverwood Center in Benton Harbor, Michigan
“Brenda does a both wonderful and inspiring talk about how the struggle for civil rights was a struggle for all forward thinking people that believed that the dignity of man was connected to everyone, and that non-violence beliefs were the path to unite people to support this struggle. When the rights of one group are violated, all of our rights are violated.”
Basil Scott, Riverwood Center