“My Father’s Dream, My Mission”
Martin Luther King III to speak at college on Thursday, January 18
Martin Luther King III, oldest son of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, will speak at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, as part of the college’s 2007 King holiday celebration.
King’s address, “My Father’s Dream, My Mission,” is part of Penn State Behrend’s annual Speaker Series and will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 18, in the Reed Union Building’s McGarvey Commons. Admission is free and open to the public, and King will take questions from the audience following his talk.
King is president and chief executive officer of The King Center in Atlanta, the institutional guardian of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Part of the city’s Freedom Hall complex, The King Center receives 650,000 visitors a year.
A human rights advocate, community activist, and political leader, King has been actively involved in significant policy initiatives to create or maintain fair and equitable treatment of all citizens both at home and abroad. His missions have taken him to numerous nations throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia to support programs rooted in his father’s tenets of nonviolent conflict resolution.
In 1986, King was elected to political office as an at-large representative of over 700,000 residents of Fulton County, Georgia. His tenure on the Board of Commissioners was marked by legislation regulating minority business participation in public contracting, strong ethics legislation, purification of the county’s natural water resources, and stringent hazardous waste disposal requirements.
On November 1, 1997, King was unanimously elected the fourth president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization that his father co-founded in 1957. An active member of the Board of Directors, King had devoted much of his adulthood to continuing his father’s mission through the many programs of the SCLC.
While leading the SCLC, King aggressively fought injustice on many fronts. SCLC was the first national organization to pull its annual convention from the state of South Carolina to protest the flying of the Confederate flag atop its capitol. In 1999, SCLC convened police brutality hearings in 11 cities to address police misconduct, brutality and racial profiling based upon ethnicity or socioeconomic class. The culmination of the hearings was an anniversary March on Washington in August 2000 to highlight the issue.
King’s own passion is the personal, educational, and skills development of young people. He has initiated a number of programs that help to support and nurture our nation’s youth, including the King Summer Intern Program that provides employment opportunities for high school students, the Hoops for Health charity basketball game to benefit babies born to drug users, and A Call to Manhood, an effort to unite young African-American males with an adult role model. His current signature project is the annual Kindness and Justice Challenge sponsored by Do Something, a Web-based nonprofit that encourages community activism.
King holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Additional spring lecturers in the Speaker Series will be:
Zanny Minton Beddoes, global economist, Thursday, February 22
Lisa Ling, host, National Geographic Ultimate Explorer, Monday, March 26
Christopher McKay, NASA planetary scientist, Tuesday, April 17
Martin Luther King III’s Speaker Series appearance is supported by the Janet Neff Sample Center for Manners and Civility, the Penn State Behrend Division of Student Affairs, the Penn State Behrend Student Activity Fee, and the Harriet Behrend Ninow Memorial Lecture Fund. For more information about the series or to arrange special accommodations for participation, phone the Office of Student Activities at 814-898-6171.