Past Observances

In 1999 author John Edgar Wideman's keynote address on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was less an occasional speech than a reading -- a lyrical, personal, work-in-progress shared with several hundred listeners in Alumni Gymnasium.

2008: “Modernizing King: Old Struggles, New Roots”

The Rev. Lawrence Carter, professor of religion at Morehouse College and curator and first dean of the college’s Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel.

2007: “Between Chaos and Community”

Civil rights activist and historian Cleveland Sellers, author of The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), first published in 1973.

2006: “The Noble Road to Peace: Storming the Battlements of Injustice”

Sharon Harley, pioneer in the field of African American women’s history and chair of the Department of African American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park.

2005: “From Montgomery to Memphis: Martin Luther King’s Legacy of Labor, Justice and Dignity”

The Rev. John Mendez, pastor of the Emmanuel Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Winston-Salem Chronbicle’s 1994 Man of the Year., pioneer in the field of African American women’s history and chair of the Department of African American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park.

Story

2004: “The Haitian Revolution: The Bicentennial and Its Legacy”

Alex Dupuy, professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Wesleyan University

Story and slide show

2003: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”

Joanne Grant, award-winning filmmaker, writer and veteran civil rights activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Movement

Story

2002: “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

James Hal Cohn, Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary

Story

2001

Jualynne E. Dodson, associate professor of Afro-American studies and religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Joanne Bland, tour director of the National Voting Rights Museum; and the Rev. James Foster Reese, director emeritus of the racial ethnic ministry unit for the Presbyterian Church (USA)