Barbara Ransby named keynote speaker for Syracuse University’s 2008 Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration

Barbara Ransby named keynote speaker for Syracuse University’s 2008 Martin Luther King Jr. CelebrationNovember 13, 2007Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Historian, writer and longtime political activist Barbara Ransby will be the keynote speaker for Syracuse University’s 23rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, “King’s Challenge: Can We Live Peacefully in a Violent World?” in the Carrier Dome on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008.

The annual celebration is among the nation’s largest university-sponsored events commemorating King. It will be preceded that day by an event in the community and “A Conversation with Barbara Ransby” at the University. Ransby will participate in all three of the day’s activities.

The evening program, which will include presentation of the 2008 Unsung Hero Awards and entertainment, begins at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Tickets for the dinner, which precedes the program at 5:30 p.m., are $20 for the general public and $13 for students without meal plans. Students with meal plans will be charged for one dinner. Tickets, which generally sell out early, will be available Dec. 3. For ticket information, call Hendricks Chapel at 443-5044.

“We are so pleased that Barbara Ransby has accepted our invitation to be this year’s keynote speaker,” says Rachael Gazdick, director of Hendricks Chapel’s Office of Community Engagement and Integrative Learning and chair of the MLK Celebration Committee. “Barbara’s scholarship is grounded in the Civil Rights Movement, and she truly is a scholar-activist. It is our hope that the University community and residents of the City of Syracuse will read Barbara’s work and engage her in dialogue when she is here in January.”

Ransby is an associate professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the recipient of a national Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (2000-01) and numerous other recognitions and awards, most notably the prestigious Catherine Prelinger Scholarship Award for her overall contributions to women’s history and her unconventional scholarly career.

She is the author of “Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision” (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, as well as dozens of articles and essays published in scholarly and popular venues.

Ransby is currently chair of the Committee on Women Historians of the American Historical Association and is working on two major research projects: a study of African American feminist organizations in the 1970s and a political biography of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2009.