January 22, 2009

The overarching theme of this year’s events commemorating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is entitled One in 100: Dismantling a Prison Nation and will highlight King’s struggle to create a beloved community where social, political, and economic justice are the norm rather than the exception.

This year’s theme centers on the conclusion of a 2008 PEW Report that revealed the sobering results of the steady growth of America’s prison industrial complex, a system that has more than one in every 100 adults confined behind bars.

UC Berkeley professor and internationally known civil rights activist Angela Davis will deliver the keynote address.

The library has a number of resource by and about Angela Davis and related to this year’s MLK celebration theme:

Books

• Angela Davis–an Autobiography
• Are Prisons Obsolete?
• Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
• If They Come in the Morning; Voices of Resistance
• Women, Race, & Class
• The Angela Y. Davis Reader
• Angela Davis: the Making of a Revolutionary
• Jury Woman : the Story of the Trial of Angela Y. Davis
• Justice in the Round; the Trial of Angela Davis
• The Morning Breaks: the Trial of Angela Davis
• Who is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary
• Autobiography as Activism : Three Black Women of the Sixties

Videos

• Black is — Black Ain’t: A Personal Journey Through Black Identity
• Fires in the Mirror

February 22, 2008

The Harvard Sitkoff book signing scheduled for 4 pm today in Special Collections has been cancelled due to the weather.

The book signing has been rescheduled for March 7 at 4 pm in Special Collections.

Noted Civil Rights scholar Harvard Sitkoff, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, will sign books at a celebration of the publication of his new biography about Martin Luther King Jr., “King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop.”

The book signing will be held 4-6 p.m., Friday, March 7, 2008, in the Milne Special Collections, Dimond Library, 1st floor. Copies of Sitkoff’s book will be available for purchase. The event is sponsored by American Studies; African American Studies; Race, Culture, and Power; and the Department of History. It is free and open to the public.

For more information about the book signing, contact Lesley Rains at lesley.rains@unh.edu or (603) 862-2179.

February 18, 2008

Noted Civil Rights scholar Harvard Sitkoff, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, will sign books at a celebration of the publication of his new biography about Martin Luther King Jr., “King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop.”

The book signing will be held 4-6 p.m., Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, in the Milne Special Collections, Dimond Library, 1st floor. Copies of Sitkoff’s book will be available for purchase. The event is sponsored by American Studies; African American Studies; Race, Culture, and Power; and the Department of History. It is free and open to the public.

Sitkoff’s biography of MLK has been called the finest brief biography of the civil rights leader. It was published Jan. 3, 2008, by Hill and Wang.

“Martin Luther King Jr. certainly had a far greater impact on my life than any other public figure, and there is no one I more admired than King. I well remember the excitement I felt as a boy reading accounts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Because of that, I got involved in the movement as a college student, and then went south briefly to march and picket and take part in the movement,” Sitkoff says.

“As a young adult, nothing exhilarated me more than King saying hello to me and shaking my hand at a civil rights demonstration in Virginia in 1962. And I’ll never forget the extraordinary jumble of emotions and thoughts that went through me as I stood in the rain on an Atlanta street as his casket went by,” he says.

For more information about the book signing, contact Lesley Rains at lesley.rains@unh.edu or (603) 862-2179.