The MLK Dinner is sold out.
Social equality activist and author Angela Davis will headline the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner on Friday, January 22, in the Brown Ballroom of the Bone Student Center. Reservations are required.
The event is sponsored by Illinois State’s Office of the President and the Illinois State student chapter of the NAACP.
Davis draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List” in her quest for equality. Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, she has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world, always emphasizing the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.
Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and the University of California at Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently she spent 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she is now a Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and of Feminist Studies.
The author of nine books on race, gender, and imprisonment, Davis’ recent works include Abolition Democracy, Are Prisons Obsolete?, and a new edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In 2012, she published a new collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom.
In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration, and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She has lectured on the subject throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. Davis is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison.
The event is part of the President’s Speaker Series at Illinois State University.
For more information, or if you need special accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact Julie Barnhill, Presidential and Trustee Events, at jtbarnh@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-8790.
