UA To Host Mlk Lecture Series Event April 2

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The University of Alabama will host the lecture titled “A Forum on Gender, Race, and Class Resistance in the 20th-Century and Beyond,” on Monday, April 2, at 3:30 p.m., in UA’s Ferguson Center Theatre.

The event is free and open to the public.

This roundtable forum is sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Lecture Series – a cooperative venture between UA, Stillman College, and Shelton State Community College.

Issues related to racial, gender and class oppression will be discussed. A panel of leading scholars and activists will also be on hand to discuss connections, as well as conflicts, between the goals, strategies, and outcomes of the movements against racism, sexism and classism, their victories, unfinished business, and contemporary/future action.

Each panelist will represent diverse perspectives in their 10-15 minute opening statements and in open discussion with the audience. Dr. Marsha Houston, chair of communication studies at UA, is scheduled to serve as moderator.

For more information on this lecture event or the MLK Lecture Series, contact Dr. Amilcar Shabazz at 205/348-6339

A Forum on Gender, Race, and Class Resistance in the 20th-Century and Beyond

Panelist Biographies

Linda Reed

Born in Five Points, Ala., Dr. Reed completed her Ph.D. at Indiana University. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston and has been there since 1988. She has also taught at Michigan State University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Auburn University. She has established a remarkable reputation as one of the most accomplished young scholars in the field of African American history. Her stature is confirmed by the prestigious fellowships she has received from the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation and Princeton University. Her book, “Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963,” further enhanced her reputation. Professor Reed is also co-editor, along with Darlene Clark Hine and Wilma King, of “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: a Reader in Black Women’s History.” Professor Reed is also the director of the University of Houston’s African American Studies Program. She is working on a historical biography of the civil rights leader, Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer.

Dorothy Turner

A champion of human rights and anti-racist work, Dorothy Turner was awarded in 1992 the Arthur L. Green Civil and Human Rights Award by the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies. This award recognized her lifelong dedicated advocacy for the protection of human rights and equal justice for all. Her commitment to grassroots struggle has resulted in the city government of Austin, Texas, hiring the city’s first female assistant city manager, the city’s first African American personnel director, the construction of the Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex, the city’s first affirmative action plan (which became a national model), the publication of a newsmagazine, The Grassroots Struggle, the broadcast for more than a decade of a weekly cable television community affairs program, Liberation!, and many other progressive developments.

Susana Almanza

Susana Almanza is a founding member and executive director of PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources), a grassroots environmental, economic and social justice organization. Almanza has overcome poverty, prejudice, and segregated schools to face down some of the world’s most powerful multinational corporations. Almanza lives in East Austin, Texas. She is a longtime community organizer, and educator, mother and grandmother. She participated in the civil rights movement as a Brown Beret taking up issues of police brutality, quality education and equity in school systems and health care as a right not a privilege. She continues her struggle for human rights demanding environmental justice and a better quality of life for people of color, for all humanity and for future generations.

Mary Stanton

Mary Stanton, in “From Selma to Sorrow: The Life And Death Of Viola Liuzzo” (University of Georgia Press, 1998), has written the first-full length biography to examine the controversial life, murder, and subsequent character assassination of a white woman who became a civil rights martyr. Stanton was a volunteer for Mountain People’s Rights in Appalachian Kentucky in the 1960s and early 1970s, and obtained a graduate degree in English from Queen’s College before beginning a long career in personnel and labor relations. She is currently a freelance writer and is at work on a book tracing the history of the 1963 Freedom Walk (begun by white activist Bill Moore who was murdered in Gadsden, Alabama in April 1963) from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss.