Bridgewater College will celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a day of virtual events, “BC Honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” on Monday, Jan. 18.
The Department of Student Life will be hosting a virtual Facebook event at 11 a.m. during which the BC community will share reflections on Dr. King’s legacy.
From noon to 3 p.m., BC faculty members will host virtual teach-ins that explore different aspects of the civil rights movement and its era. At noon, Associate Professor of Music and Department Chair Dr. Christine Carrillo will lead “The Soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement – A Jazz Listening Session.” At 1 p.m., Dr. Steve Longenecker, Professor of History and Political Science, will host “History of the Civil Rights Movement.” And at 2 p.m., Dr. Alice Trupe, Professor of English, will lead “Young Adult Literature on the Civil Rights Movement.”
The teach-ins are free and open to members of the BC community as well as the public. BC students can find the Zoom links in their BC email. Community members should reach out to Dr. Jamie Frueh at jfrueh@bridgewater.edu.
At 7 p.m., Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley, winner of the prestigious Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians for her book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson, will present a virtual endowed lecture.
Kelley is currently working on a new book, Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class,under contract at Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton and Company.
Kelley has produced and hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris Perry Show,” NPR’s “Here and Now” and WUNC’s “The State of Things.” She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, TheRoot.com, TheGrio.com, Salon.com, Ebony and Jet magazines. She was among the first generation of historians active on Twitter and has been tweeting as @profblmkelley for more than 10 years.
She received her B.A. in history and African and African American studies from the University of Virginia. She earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history and graduate certificates in African and African studies and women’s studies from Duke University.
This endowed lecture, sponsored by the W. Harold Row Symposium, is free and open to the public. To register for the event, please use the following link: https://bridgewater.edu/blairkelley.
