News Archives - 2006

The 18th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Convocation will be held on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 1 p.m. in the Hoversten Chapel.  The program will feature a keynote address by Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr., SNCC Co-founder and Director of Non-violent and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr., Ed.D., has been a Civil Rights Movement activist, minister, educator, lecturer, and is an authority on the strategy on nonviolent social change. He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. He was a leader of the Nashville Movement, 1960 and on the Freedom Rides, 1961 and the 1965 Selma Movement. He directed the Alabama Voter Registration Project in 1962, and he was appointed National Program Administrator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and National Coordinator of the 1968 Poor Peoples’ Campaign by Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition, Dr. LaFayette has served as Director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; Chairperson of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development; Director of the PUSH Excel Institute; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama. 

An ordained minister, Dr. LaFayette earned his B.A. from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and his Ed.M. and Ed.D from Harvard University. He has served on the faculties of Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta and Alabama State University in Montgomery, where he was Dean of the Graduate School; he also was principal of Tuskegee Institute High School in Tuskegee, Alabama and a teaching fellow at Harvard University.

The MLK Convocation is our annual celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and our call for social action. For additional information contact Trena Bolden Fields, bolden@augsburg.edu, 612-330-1022.