Location: Off Site, Free Lib. of Philadelphia, Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine St.
The Core 5 Year Anniversary Gala will take place at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Sunday, June 29 from 7:00-9:00pm in the Skyline Terrance. The event will feature light refreshments an author presentation.
Address: 1901 Vine St Philadelphia, PA 19103
Speaker: Ray Arsenault
The first 140 attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Arsenault’s book, and he will be available for a book signing following his remarks.
Presentation: "John Lewis, Good Trouble, and the Search for the Beloved Community”
My talk will the extraordinary life and career of John Lewis (1940-2020), a prominent civil rights leader during the 1960s who later became a highly influential 17-term (1987-2020) congressman representing Atlanta, Georgia. As a tireless proponent of nonviolent direct action, voting rights, racial equality, and social justice, Lewis earned an unmatched reputation for integrity, moral and physical courage, and the willingness to get into what he called “good trouble.” Throughout his life, he exemplified the virtues of compassion, reconciliation, and generosity as he followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s lead searching for “the beloved community,” an ideal society in which no one is systematically excluded or oppressed. In the last decades of his life, he came to symbolise the promise of American democracy for millions of Americans. In my talk, I will pay particular attention to his staunch commitment to the First Amendment and the constitutional right of free expression.
Ray Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus, at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, where he taught from 1980 to 2020. One of the nation’s leading civil rights historians, he is the author of several acclaimed and prize-winning books, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice and The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America.
