A two-week celebration and exploration of civil rights at St. Ambrose will continue today when Cornel West, PhD, a renowned civil rights activist, scholar, and author, leads St. Ambrose students in a conversation on the topic of race and civil rights in America.
The discussion will take place at 2 p.m. in the Beehive.
A Union Theological Seminary professor who previously taught at Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris, West is an author of 19 books, including 1993's seminal Race Matters. He also is a noted television commentator on the subject of race, and he spoke to a capacity audience at St. Ambrose University in September of 2012 as the introductory lecturer for that year's academic project theme, "Race Matters."
"Any serious discussion about 'Race Matters' in America has to deal with is what kind of person do you really want to be?," he said in Q&A interview with St. Ambrose prior to that lecture. "What kind of community, what kind of nation, do we really want to be? In terms of our ethical content, our moral substance and our democratic character. So in that sense, to talk about race and to talk about 'Race Matters' is to raise the most fundamental questions of any humanistic education."
In service to our core value commitment to diversity and led by Director for Diversity Ryan Saddler, St. Ambrose University continues to pursue questions pertaining to race and civil rights. Civil Rights Week is an annual celebration of the Civil Rights Movement and the historic role St. Ambrose University leaders played. Activities included a March to Remember; Mass to highlight civil rights and human liberties; student service trip to the River Bend Foodbank warehouse; Brewed Awakenings discussion led by St. Ambrose alum; a "Love Your Body" workshop conducted by the campus Triota chapter and the Junior League of the Quad Cities and trustee emeritus and SAU Diversity Work Group leader Jim Collins '69; a presentation on the Historical Iowa Civil Rights Network; and a presentation on "The Urgency of Civil Rights, Then and Now."
Free Food Friday, featuring ethnic cooking demonstrations and free food sampling, will be held at 3:30 p.m. today at the Multicultural House at 411 West Locust St., Davenport. Pradhanica, a performance of the Indian classical dance form of Kathak, will officially wrap-up the two-week exploration of civil rights at 7:30 p.m. at the Galvin Fine Arts Center.
Share This Story
