Monday, January 15, 2018 10 a.m. in Christ Chapel
The annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture emphasizes the continuing struggle for civil rights. In 2018 the lecture was provided by civil rights activist and sociologist, Joyce Ladner. The keynote address titled, "The Civil Rights Movement, Still Marching After All These Years" will include personal stories as a leader in the movement and reflections on work that continues to be needed.
Sociologist Joyce Ladner is one of the nation’s pre-eminent thought leaders. Her career has been shaped through her first hand involvement with the civil rights movement in Mississippi and as a staff member that organized the March on Washington in 1963. She worked alongside Bayard Rustin and other civil rights leaders. In 1963 she was jailed for a week for attempting to integrate the all-white Galloway Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a native of Mississippi and began her fight for social justice as a teenager when she helped organize an NAACP Youth Chapter in her hometown. She was expelled from Jackson State College in Mississippi for organizing a civil rights protest.
She was a friend and worked with slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, as well as civil
rights pioneers Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. As a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ladner was on the front lines of most of the major civil rights protests in the sixties including Greenwood, Birmingham, Albany, Selma and other dangerous areas and was on the stage when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech.
An eminent sociologist, Ladner has studied and interpreted the intersectionality of race,
gender and class. Her book, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman was the first book published in African American Women’s Studies and is now an American classic. Her book, The Death of White Sociology, was a landmark work that challenged the value neutrality of mainstream sociology. She has published five additional books and numerous articles.
Ladner was a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Howard University. She also served as provost and interim president of Howard University. Ladner earned a B.A. from Tougaloo College and a PhD from Washington University, St. Louis. She studied the roles of Tanzanian women in nation building and she has lived in Dakar, Senegal as well. President Bill Clinton appointed Ladner to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board, which balanced the budget of the District of Columbia. She was also a senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. She has appeared on nationally syndicated radio and television programs. Joyce Ladner is completing her memoir titled Standing in the Gap: A Memoir of Resistance, Rebirth and Redemption that captures the spirit of her 1960s generation of SNCC workers that challenged segregation and discrimination in the South, and changed the face of
America.
This events is sponsored by the Chaplains Office, Diversity Center, Peace Studies Program, President's Office, and Target.
The event is free and open to the public.
Class Modification Schedule
Classes that normally meet at or after 10:30 a.m. will start (and end) one hour later than they normally would. Thus, classes that begin at 10:30 AM will start at 11:30 a.m., classes beginning at 11:30 a.m. will begin at 12:30 p.m., and so on.
