Guests Anthea Butler and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman will participate in a discussion of King’s civil rights movement, then and now.
The University of Rochester’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Address will take place in a new format this year: a moderated discussion to be held Friday, January 20, 2023, in Feldman Ballroom at Frederick Douglass Commons from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The event will also be available via Zoom.
Registration is required to attend or watch online.
Two scholars have been invited to campus to discuss the intersection of social justice, politics, and religion—how they impact each other, and how they affected King and the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Anthea Butler is chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, an opinion writer for MSNBC, and president of the American Society for Church History.
Valeria Sinclair-Chapman is a professor of political science at Purdue University and director of Purdue’s Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion.
The discussion will be moderated by Jeffrey McCune, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies and is sponsored by the Office of Minority Student Affairs (OMSA) and the Office of the President.
“This year, the traditional address has been reimagined and will be a conversation between two nationally recognized scholars,” says Thomas Crews, assistant director, HEOP at OMSA who co-chairs the event with OMSA assistant dean and director Norman Burnett and OMSA assistant director Mary Mendez Rizzo. “Using Dr. King’s civil discourse approach, and Frederick Douglass’s rhetoric as a guide, our guest scholars will merge their intellectual prowess to address some of the most pressing questions on contemporary issues of freedom, civil rights, social justice, politics and religion.”
Butler and Sinclair-Chapman will meet with student leaders in the Douglass Leadership House prior to the event and will take questions from the audience following their discussion. Butler will sign copies of her latest book, White Evangelical Racism—The Politics of Morality in America, after the event concludes.
Category: University News
