UNE’s Tangier Forum for Global Studies hosts lecture on “The Long March for Civil Rights in America”

The effort to provide full rights to all U.S. citizens involved a continuous struggle from the country’s founding until the 1960s when Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a symbol of the cause and those rights were, at long last, officially acknowledged.  

In a lecture titled “The Long March for Civil Rights in America,” scholar Robert Michael Franklin, Ph.D., reviewed the history of this struggle and illustrated the role of culture, interfaith religious cooperation and technology in establishing full civil rights for all Americans.

Presented through the University of New England’s Tangier Forum for Global Studies, the March 24, 2016 lecture took place in the auditorium at UNE’s campus in Tangier, Morocco. In addition to welcoming a multicultural audience in Tangier, the lecture was also live-streamed to viewers around the world.

Franklin is president emeritus of Morehouse College, the United States’ only all-male historically black institution of higher learning, where he served as tenth president from 2007 to 2012. He is currently the James T. and Berta R. Laney Professor of Moral Leadership at Emory University and director of the Religion Department of the Chautauqua Institution. In 2014, he served as senior advisor for Community and Diversity at Emory. In 2013, he served as visiting scholar in residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. 

In addition to penning the foreword to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, reprinted by Trinity Forum in 2012, Franklin is the author of three books: Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities (2007); Another Day’s Journey: Black Churches Confronting the American Crisis (1997); and Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African American Thought (1990). 

Read more in the Stamford Advocate and the Times Union.