Civil rights movement activist Bernard LaFayette Jr. will deliver the 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture on Monday, Jan. 17 in Christ Chapel at Gustavus Adolphus College.
LaFayette will speak at 10:20 a.m. as part of the College’s daily worship service, which begins at 10 a.m. A question and answer session will follow LaFayette’s presentation at approximately 11 a.m. The lecture is sponsored by the Gustavus peace studies program.
LaFayette co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, and played a leadership role in several key Civil Rights Movement events in the early 1960s, including the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, and the Selma, Alabama, voting rights movement in 1965.
In addition to his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, LaFayette has also been a minister, educator, and lecturer, and is an authority on the strategy of nonviolent social change. He has served as director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; director of the PUSH Excel Institute; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Ala.
LaFayette also spent two years at Gustavus in the mid 1970s as chairperson of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Devleopment (CoPRED), and as the director of the College’s peace education program which eventually evolved into the peace studies program.
LaFayette earned his B.A. from American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tenn., and his Ed.M., C.A.S., and Ed.D. from Harvard University. He has served on the faculties of Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta and Alabama State University in Montgomery, Ala., where he was dean of the Graduate School.
For more information about the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture, contact the College’s Diversity Center at 507-933-7449 or Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Peace Studies Program Mimi Gerstbauer at mgerstba@gustavus.edu.
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