WHERE IS THE RACE DIALOGUE IN
TWO YEARS AFTER OBAMA’S A MORE PERFECT UNION SPEECH,
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS RETURN
TO THE
Philadelphia, PA – On the two-year anniversary of then-Senator Barack Obama’s pivotal campaign speech, A More Perfect Union, Martin Luther King, III, Founding President and CEO of Realizing the Dream, Inc., Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of "Washington Week," and Thomas J. Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, will join the National Constitution Center for an open dialogue on race, moderated by Charles A. Williams III, assistant clinical professor and director of the Center for the Prevention of School-Aged Violence at Drexel University. Before joining the panel, Dr. Michael L. Lomax, President and CEO of UNCF (the United Negro College Fund), will begin the conversation with a presentation proposing that education leads
The event will take place from the very stage where Obama’s speech was delivered at the
The Center will continue the conversation started by President Obama’s challenge to navigate the complexities of race in order to create a “more perfect
As president and CEO of UNCF, Dr. Michael L. Lomax heads the nation's largest and most effective minority education organization. Through its member colleges and universities, scholarship programs and advocacy activities, UNCF, under Lomax’s leadership, has worked to combat inequality for low income students of color and overcome educational inequity. Lomax joined UNCF after serving for seven years as president of
Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of "Washington Week" and senior correspondent for "The PBS Newshour." She is also the best-selling author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Ifill reports on a wide range of issues, from foreign affairs to
Historian, author, and critic Thomas J. Sugrue is a specialist in twentieth-century American politics, urban history, civil rights, and race. His forthcoming book, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010. Sugrue's most recent book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, was selected as a Main Selection of the History Book Club and a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, won the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Philip Taft
Prize in Labor History, the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association, and the Urban History Association Award for Best Book in North American Urban History. Sugrue is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters, and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe, among others.
This program is part of the Knight Constitutional Conversation series, which has been generously underwritten by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and
invests in the vitality of the
The National Constitution Center, located at 525 Arch St. on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing public understanding of the U.S. Constitution and the ideas and values it represents. The Center serves as a museum, an education center, and a forum for debate on constitutional issues. The museum dramatically tells the story of the Constitution from Revolutionary times to the present through more than 100 interactive, multimedia exhibits, film, photographs, text, sculpture and artifacts, and features a powerful, award-winning theatrical performance, “Freedom Rising.” The Center also houses the
###
CONTACTS: Ashley Berke Alex Podmaska Director of Public Relations Public Relations Coordinator 215.409.6693 215.409.6895 aberke@constitutioncenter.org apodmaska@constitutioncenter.org