Program to look at MLK's unfinished agenda in the Obama era

April 8, 2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A program featuring musical performances and a lecture by a civil rights historian is scheduled Wednesday at the Eastside Recreation Center.

“Where Do We Go From Here? Translating Dr. King’s Unfinished Agenda into the Era of Barack Obama” will be an opportunity to reflect on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the challenges that he posed to U.S. society through his activism as well as his final book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” The evening will begin with a rendition of freedom songs from the 1960s.

The program is organized by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida and sponsored by the Florida Humanities Council, the North Central Florida Central Labor Council and the Real Rosewood Foundation. The event starts at 7 p.m. at 2841 E. University Ave.

University of Washington professor Mike Honey is an award-winning historian of the civil rights and labor movements. He is the president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. He is also the author of “Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle” as well as “Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers.”

Honey’s most recent book is “Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign” (2007), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

In a speech he delivered in 1967, King said, “Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.”

The program is free and open to the public.