Davidson College hosts a series of events on Monday and Tuesday, Jan. 20-21, to mark Martin Luther King Day 2014. They include King Day for Kids, civil rights films, and a slam poetry performance.

MONDAY, JAN 20

9-11am in Alvarez College Union Brown Atrium – “King Day for Kids” – Area youth grades K-5 are invited to take part in small group readings, arts and crafts, storytelling, and personal expressions of their dream. Children will receive literacy-based goodie bags at the end of the afternoon. Please register prior to Monday, Jan. 13, via http://tinyurl.com/kingdayforkids. For information contact Kyle Goodfellow at kygoodfellow@davidson.edu or 704-894-2460.

9am-3pm in Alvarez College Union Room 313 – “Civil Rights Cinema” – The six-part series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” will be shown continually during this time. Written and presented by Prof. Henry Louis Gates, the film explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed to forge their history, culture and society against unimaginable odds.

11 a.m. in Alvarez College Union Smith 900 Room – Dr. Martin Luther King Day Lecture—“40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk” – Professors Nancy Fairley and Hilton Kelly will screen the video “40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk” as an introduction to an examination of the divergent memories of high school students who integrated schools in the American South. They will discuss the difficulties experienced by African American students, and the denial of complicity by white students.

1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. in Alvarez College Union Room 209 – MLK Seminar Series: “Racial Framing in Disney Films and Social Media” – Scholars concur that racial framing plays an important role in the perpetuation of racism. Racial framing is defined as an organized set of racial ideas, narrative, images, and stereotypes that denigrate and discriminate against minority groups. During this session Davidson students Joshua Arthur, Tommy Chaisuesomboon, Elizabeth Lackey, Craig Stevens, Joi Stevens, and Zach Zapatero will demonstrate how racial framing is perpetuated in social media such as Facebook, Vine, Instagram and Walt Disney films.

1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. in Alvarez College Union Sprinkle Room – MLK Seminar Series: “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Successful Struggle Against Jim Crow” – Professor of History Daniel Aldridge will lead this discussion about how the Civil Rights movement actually began immediately after African Americans were freed from slavery following the Civil War. Though Martin Luther King is justly celebrated as one of the greatest human rights leaders in world history he was part of a long tradition that included many figures such as Booker T. Washington, Ida Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. The struggle still continues, but the successes of African American forbears will be recognized in this session.

1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. in Alvarez College Union Room 303 – MLK Seminar Series: “Disingenuous Narratives of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Children’s Literature” – Davidson College senior Callie Anderson leads this presentation of her research into how representations of Dr. King in school curriculum and children’s books have turned him into a mythic figure, and simultaneously distorted his life and activism.

3 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. in Alvarez College Union Smith 900 Room – MLK Seminar Series: “Poetic Reflections of Social Justice” – Clint Smith, a 23 year-old Class of 2010 Davidson graduate, poet, educator, and activist from New Orleans, will perform his prize-winning slam poetry. Smith founded Davidson College’s “Free Word” slam poetry team, and has performed at slams, universities, workshops, and poetry festivals throughout the United States and across Southern Africa. Smith won the 2012 Graffiti DC Grand Slam, and is a member of the 2012 Beltway Poetry Team, representing DC at the National Poetry Slam. Smith has also served as a State Department cultural ambassador to Swaziland, where he conducted poetry workshops focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and self-empowerment with youth.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 21

Benjamin Jealous

11 a.m. – noon in Duke Family Performance Hall – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Featuring NAACP Immediate Past President Benjamin Jealous – Benjamin Todd Jealous stepped down at the end of 2013 as the youngest president in the history of the NAACP. Jealous has been a leader of successful state and local movements to ban the death penalty, outlaw racial profiling, defend voting rights, secure marriage equality, and free wrongfully incarcerated people. He began his career at the NAACP at age 18 opening mail at the Legal Defense Fund. Under his leadership, the NAACP experienced its first multi-year membership growth in twenty years, and became the largest community-based nonpartisan voter registration operation in the country. A Rhodes Scholar, he is a graduate of Columbia and Oxford Universities. He has been named to the 40 under 40 lists of both Forbes and Time magazines, and labeled a Young Global Economic Leader by the World Economic Forum.