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Opening Celebration
January 23, 2017 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Join the Cultural Center Collaborative, RUPA and Rutgers Student Affairs for the opening of our Inaugural Dream Week Celebration, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther’s King’s legacy. The themes of Dr. Martin Luther King’s extensive career of community activism and service are ever-present today; so we will be honoring his contributions on reflecting on what it means to dream and imagine a more just and equitable world.
The program will include remarks and reflections from Rutgers University – NB Chancellor Richard Edwards, a performance of the Negro National Anthem, a spoken word performance, keynote lecture by Dr. Jelani Cobb, professor of Journalism at Columbia and writer for The New Yorker, a post-lecture Q&A with Dr. Cobb and a standing reception immediately to follow.
Dr. Jelani Cobb’s biography:
Jelani Cobb writes about the enormous complexity of race in America. In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns, in which he combined “the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian.” Cobb teaches in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has penned a remarkable serie2s of articles about race, the police, and injustice. His articles include “The Anger in Ferguson,” “Murders in Charleston,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations.” In awarding him the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the jury wrote, “No one has done a better job of placing [the events in Ferugson, MO]—and similar happenings in other places like Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio and Staten Island, New York—in their broader context than Jelani Cobb.” Further: “Cobb met the challenge of describing the turmoil in Ferguson in a way that cut through the frantic chaos of ‘breaking news’ and deepened readers’ understanding of what they were seeing, hearing, and feeling. Ferguson was not an aberration, he showed, but a microcosm
of race relations in the United States—organically connected to the complicated legacy of segregation and the unpaid debts of slavery itself.”
Cobb was formerly associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Africana Studies Institute. He has received Fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations. He is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic, and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. His forthcoming book is Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931.