How to Join MLK Day at Bates<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Under the theme “Confronting Our History; Justice for Coming Times,” this year’s MLK Day events, including the keynote and workshops<\/a>, will be offered virtually. The prerecorded event will be shared starting at 9 a.m<\/a> (no registration is required). Requiring pregistration, workshops on Sunday and Monday, required, are open for Zoom attendance. <\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n Monday\u2019s keynote kicks off with welcomes from President Clayton Spencer and Bates Student Government co-Presidents Perla Figuereo \u201921 of the Bronx, N.Y., and Lebanos Mengistu \u201921 of Somerville, Mass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But the term many use to describe her, including Sargent\u2019s co-chair on the MLK Day committee, assistant professor of history Andrew Baker, is \u201cicon.\u201d In 2020, when Time<\/em> produced its \u201c100 Women of the Year\u201d feature, a list looking back over the past century, Davis was named Woman of the Year for 1971.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe has been an icon for so long,\u201d Baker says. \u201cShe can speak to the struggle for racial justice over a 50-, nearly 60-year period, being at the very forefront of it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of Baker’s courses, \u201cBlack Resistance from the Civil War to Civil Rights,\u201d directly addresses Davis\u2019s work, so it was a \u201cdream\u201d scenario to have Davis say yes to Bates\u2019 invitation, he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Attending the keynote recording session was personally rewarding for Baker \u2014 \u201cto be able to just sit back and feel like you\u2019re learning from somebody who\u2019s done everything that there is possible to do, and who has mobilized in every way possible and has been at the forefront of these struggles.\u201d Now he\u2019s looking forward to it being shared with the full Bates community Monday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Students, faculty and staff were invited to submit their names to participate in the event, with a limit of 55. Unsurprisingly, those spots filled up quickly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo me she\u2019s almost the prophetic figure, right?\u201d<\/p>Andrew Baker, assistant professor of history and co-chair of the MLK Day Planning Committee<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201cEven if you haven\u2019t read a book by Angela Davis, or even listened to an interview with Angela Davis, you know who Angela Davis is,\u201d says Joshua Redd \u201821 of Brooklyn, N.Y., who, as president of the Bates Black Student Union, has the honor of introducing Davis as the keynote speaker. Noelle Chaddock, vice president for equity and inclusion, serves as moderator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty years ago, the civil rights activist and scholar made her first, memorable visit to Bates, on Jan. 16, 1991, speaking to a full house in the chapel just as the country was entering the Persian Gulf War and just two days before the faculty voted to cancel classes for the first time to observe MLK Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, she had just published Women, Culture, and Politics<\/em>, and she has since published five more books, including the 2003 work Are Prisons Obsolete?<\/em> \u201cThe book is really packed with amazing information,\u201d Redd says. \u201cIt\u2019s valuable information that I think everybody could benefit from. She explains herself so easily and so concisely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Are Prisons Obsolete?<\/em> will serve as a springboard, along with Abolition for the People<\/em>, a set of essays convened last year by Colin Kaepernick, for a live workshop session called “Abolition: A World Without Policing and Prisons,” taking place at 10:45 a.m., immediately after the keynote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis\u2019s scholarship on the carceral state is world renowned and hard-won; she experienced incarceration firsthand in the early 1970s, when she was held in jail for over a year on felony charges for which she was later acquitted. In 1997 she was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, which aims to dismantle the prison system, not just in America, but worldwide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you look over her career, she\u2019s been ahead of the conversation on race in ways that America has only caught up to her in, often a few decades later,\u201d Baker says. \u201cTo me she\u2019s almost the prophetic figure, right?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Pickens, the challenge of preparing for Davis\u2019s keynote was not just to reread seminal works by Davis, first encountered during her time as a graduate student at UCLA \u2014 \u201cI wanted to kind of live in her words a bit\u201d \u2014 but to make a bi-coastal Zoom feel like a real conversation. \u201cI don\u2019t like it when interviewers kind of pump people for information.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pickens\u2019 aim, then, was not to be like Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer but more Gayle King or Oprah Winfrey. \u201cLet\u2019s sit on the couch and talk.\u201d She found Davis to be \u201cincredibly gracious\u201d in thought and conversation, especially with the students who were invited to take part and ask questions in the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Redd used the word \u201cmesmerizing\u201d to describe the experience of being in Davis\u2019s presence. Redd is also directing the Sankofa program, the culminating event of the college\u2019s two-day MLK celebration. Typically the event is a live performance, featuring music and dance, but this year\u2019s program, \u201cSankofa: Embracing Diasporic Conversations,\u201d will bring Black people together to engage in \u201cserious, radical thoughts and imaginations\u201d with a panel of current and past Bates students as well as some faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The talk, Redd says, will be about work that matters. \u201cAbout how to keep ourselves involved with this work that needs to essentially change the world,\u201d he says. \u201cHow we, as Black people in this world, come about making that change and being the change seekers of the world.\u201d Davis opens a day of reflection with her Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote, “Reckoning,” on the carceral state. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1283,"featured_media":137912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,175],"tags":[5709],"class_list":["post-137860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-justice-poverty","tag-martin-luther-king-jr-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137860"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137922,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137860\/revisions\/137922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/mlk\/files\/2021\/01\/210104-Angela_Davis_1919.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"