{"id":173833,"date":"2026-01-19T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=173833"},"modified":"2026-07-20T09:16:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:16:53","slug":"martin-luther-king-jr-day-2026-keynote-and-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2026\/01\/19\/martin-luther-king-jr-day-2026-keynote-and-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Keynote and Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Myisha Cherry<\/strong>\u00a0is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the Director of the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.emotionandsociety.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Emotion and Society Lab<\/a>. Her research is primarily concerned with the role of emotions and attitudes in public life. Cherry\u2019s books include\u00a0<em>UnMuted: Conversations on Prejudice, Oppression, and Social Justice<\/em>\u00a0(Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Owen Flanagan,\u00a0<em>The Moral Psychology of Anger<\/em>\u00a0(Rowman &amp; Littlefield), and\u00a0<em>The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle<\/em>\u00a0published by Oxford University Press. Her latest book,\u00a0<em>Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better<\/em>\u00a0was released by Princeton University Press in 2023. Her work on emotions and race has appeared in\u00a0<em>The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Huffington Post, WomanKind,\u00a0<\/em>and<em>\u00a0New Philosopher Magazine<\/em>. Cherry is also the host of the UnMute Podcast, where she interviews philosophers about the social and political issues of our day.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video wp-embed-aspect-16-9\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n\t\t\t\t<lite-youtube videoid=\"OzxI0hWLHnk\" params=\"modestbranding=1&#038;rel=0\" playlabel=\"Myisha Cherry | The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Keynote 2026 | Bates College\" title=\"Myisha Cherry | The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Keynote 2026 | Bates College\" >\n\t\t\t<\/lite-youtube>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Presented by students from Morehouse and Bates colleges, this debate honors the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Mays, a 1920 Bates graduate, prominent debater, longtime Morehouse president, pioneer of the civil rights movement, and important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr..<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year\u2019s topic is \u201cResolved: This house believes that social justice movements should practice a politics of anger.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dr. King offered a complicated assessment of anger\u2019s place in our struggle for social change. Dr. King once cautioned in his speech titled \u201cThe Other America\u201d that \u201cangered expressions\u201d of despair could produce \u201cbitterness in the violent rebellions\u201d of civil rights activists. Yet, Dr. King also recognized anger\u2019s positive potential in his 1968 commemoration of W.E.B. Du Bois, expressing that \u201cthe supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video wp-embed-aspect-16-9\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n\t\t\t\t<lite-youtube videoid=\"8yDvq9PVLwQ\" params=\"modestbranding=1&#038;rel=0\" playlabel=\"Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 | Bates College\" title=\"Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 | Bates College\" >\n\t\t\t<\/lite-youtube>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Myisha Cherry\u00a0is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":171794,"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,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"","_header-color":"","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"","override_related_with_tag":"","_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":[1,12193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-batesnews","category-livestream"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173833","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\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173834,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173833\/revisions\/173834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}